


The Might of the Architect

by tinyporcelainehorses



Category: Harry Potter - J. K. Rowling
Genre: Attempted Sexual Assault, Canon Compliant, Eventual Romance, F/F, Gen, Historical, Hogwarts Founders Era, Long, Major Original Character(s), Necromancy, POV Original Character, Queer Character, Tags May Change, Wandlore (Harry Potter)
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2020-05-03
Updated: 2021-02-26
Packaged: 2021-03-02 02:41:32
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Major Character Death
Chapters: 15
Words: 77,997
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/23957842
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/tinyporcelainehorses/pseuds/tinyporcelainehorses
Summary: Hogwarts, Britain's largest community of magical learning, is only decades old and already bitterly divided.  England has fallen to a foreign king.  And as the stone walls of Hogwarts grow ever higher, whispers say that Salazar Slytherin is plotting something...  Two students from either side of a war are driven together by events that will change Britain, magical and non-magical, forever.Winner of Fanfictalk's Ravenclaw Story of the Month, December 2020.  Runner up for /r/fanfiction Best of 2020 awards, action and adventure.
Relationships: Godric Gryffindor & Helga Hufflepuff & Rowena Ravenclaw & Salazar Slytherin, Godric Gryffindor & Salazar Slytherin, Helena Ravenclaw & Rowena Ravenclaw, Helena Ravenclaw/Original Character(s), Helena Ravenclaw/Original Female Character(s), Original Female Character & Original Male Character, The Bloody Baron & Helena Ravenclaw
Comments: 159
Kudos: 42
Collections: Fic Journal of the Plague Year





	1. Dragons on the River

**Author's Note:**

> With thanks to Hawksquill for endless reading and rereading.
> 
> Tags will change as the story continues to avoid spoilers, but character tags are accurate for who you can expect eventually. Expect a somewhat slow opening. I won't commit to a specific update schedule, but for the sake of some regularity and letting myself keep a lead of written material, I probably won't post more than every two weeks. Comments always appreciated!
> 
> Update 5/28/20: a future chapter will contain one brief, non-graphic scene of attempted sexual assault. I will also add a content warning to the chapter itself upfront.

**Chapter One: Dragons on the River**

**1066 Anno Domine.**

Summer was beginning to fade. The leaves were just beginning to turn, the pigs were fatted, and the chill hadn’t yet set in. Edmund’s Granny had told him to get out from under her feet for a few hours while she used the shortening daylight to weave, so he and his friend Osbert had run to the river.

The current babbled and played around the stones, and they were happy to sit with their feet in the water. “When I’m a grown up,” said Osbert, “and I’m a huskarl, fighting for King Harold, I’m going to kill a hundred Danes on the battlefield.” Edmund nodded. “And then, with all the treasure I take from them, I’m going to build a feasting hall here, covered in gold, so that everyone can come and eat and drink as much as they want.”

This was not a new topic of conversation. They both hated the Danes, the longboat raiders; they only came to steal, and burn, and kill and make trouble. From up and down the coast, traders passed whispered stories of halls pillaged, farmsteads burnt, and monks butchered, and the grownups would talk about it in quiet, worried knots. Edmund knew, too, that when he was very little, too little to remember, his father had been killed by raiders, leaving him with Granny. Osbert had lost an uncle to them, too, before he was born, and so they talked about becoming huskarls, about taking up arms, and the two of them played Danes and Englishmen in the woods whenever they could.

But Edmund felt the water rushing over his feet, felt smooth, sun-warmed pebbles against his soles, and considered. “I don’t think you could kill a _hundred_ Danes,” he said, with thought, and perhaps a note of regret. “That’s an awful lot.”

“I’d do it,” said Osbert. “You wait and see. I’d take my sword, and I’d cut them down. I’d catch them unawares. Alfric used to do that, he told me,” he said, importantly – and that gave Edmund pause, because old Alfric, who had come to the village only a few summers ago, had been a real life Huskarl on campaign with King Harold. He was the closest thing either of the boys had to the heroes of songs and poems, and they both worshipped him.

“Yeah, but that was probably just one or two,” said Edmund, after some consideration. “Not even Alfric could cut through a _hundred_ Vikings. Probably not even a _saint_ could, so I bet you couldn’t.”

“Could too,” said Osbert. He paused. “You’d get to kill even more, I reckon,” he said. “Because of what you and Alfric were talking about, you-“

“Hey,” said Edmund, frowning. “Don’t, I’m not allowed to talk about that.”

“Says who?”

“Says my granny,” said Edmund fiercely, citing the only authority on earth he respected and feared more than Alfric. “She says it’s ungodly,” he said.

“ _I_ don’t think getting away from the Vikings is ungodly,” said Osbert, sanctimoniously, “and I bet your Granny doesn’t think that neither. Nor killing them. I think she’s just being-“

“Don’t talk about my Granny like that!” said Edmund, and he reached his arm into the cool water, splashing a glittering arc of it over Osbert’s head. It caught Osbert in the face, and he laughed, ready to splash back: but as he turned, arms outreached, he froze.

“Osbert?” said Edmund. Osbert didn’t reply, staring at something behind Edmund’s head. Slowly, so Edmund wouldn’t think he was going to splash him, the other boy reached out an arm and pointed. Edmund wondered for a moment if it was a heron, a kingfisher, or some other wonderous creature he didn’t want to startle: but if it were a bird or a fish, why did Osbert look so afraid?

Carefully, he turned around, and his stomach turned. He saw eyes staring back at him in the distance, but not the eyes of anything living. Advancing slowly up the river were still, carved dragon eyes. But not just one dragon – no, the river was teeming with a mass of dragon-headed warships.

“ _Vikings_ ,” whispered Edmund, more to himself than to Osbert. The two boys both froze, looking out at the fleet making its way upstream. One ship, last year, had been a catastrophe, something the entire village had talked about for months after, but this was more than either of them could count.

“Do it!” said Osbert. “Do the witchcraft you did last time!”

* * *

Sometimes, when Edmund really wanted something, or if he was scared, he could make things happen. Even if they didn’t make sense.

Hilda and Osbert swore that, when they’d been chased by the goose two summers ago, he’d grabbed both of them and without taking a step, they’d all suddenly been safely on the other side of the fence. Once, the last of Granny’s flour had been full of weevils, and she’d made a face and retched. But when he’d gone to give the flour to the pigs, it had become a normal sack of flour after all. The grownups didn’t really believe him. They’d told him that they’d all been so scared of the goose, and they’d run so fast, that they’d forgotten hopping the fence. Granny had said that maybe there were never any weevils at all, and her old eyes just weren’t what they used to be. But Alfric had always wanted to hear more. Alfric must have been as old as Granny, but where her face had gone soft with lines, his had gone hard and craggy. His grey eyes sparkled with something Edmund didn’t quite understand when Edmund told him about the strange things that happened to him; Alfric always listened carefully, even if he didn’t say much.

And then last summer, ten raiders had rampaged through the village, taken the silver from the church, and returned to the river to sail back out to sea. No blood had been shed: everyone had hidden in the woods, but Edmund had been catching trout at the stream: he hadn’t seen the carved dragon head on the river, hadn’t heard the men coming. He’d walked back into the village humming a song only to find himself face to face with a huge, bearded stranger carrying a sword longer than his whole arm. A huge beard overflowed from the man’s helmet, and Edmund was close enough to see the veins running through his eyes and smell the sour stink of him. Edmund had frozen in place, terrified: surely he was going to die. But the man hadn’t seen him at all: he’d looked straight through Edmund. It was as though the boy wasn’t there at all, and after a few moments of pure terror, Edmund had slowly backed out of sight.

After that, no one had said he was making things up anymore, although Granny still never wanted to talk about it with him. He’d try to bring it up, but as soon as the topic moved to the miraculous things he could do, Granny would suddenly think of something that needed doing urgently. The pigs would need to be fed, or he’d need to bring more cords of wood for the fire indoors, or perhaps the pot over the fire would need cleaning. These tasks hadn’t seemed at all urgent a few minutes ago, but now they were so important there was no way they could talk about anything else. This didn’t make very much sense to Edmund, but the things grown-ups decided needed doing rarely did, so he didn’t think too much of it.

While Edmund had been unsuccessful in his attempts to broach the subject, though, Alfric had been talking with Granny about something, more than once. While he couldn’t _hear_ what it the two of them were saying, Edmund recognized the downturn in the corners of his granny’s mouth, and he knew exactly what they were talking about. The first few conversations had been quiet, but then they’d started having flaming rows every time they saw each other. Edmund still couldn’t understand what they were saying, though, and Granny absolutely refused to explain to him.

That winter, after the snows came, everyone was huddled into the hall for warmth and light. Granny wasn’t talking to Alfric anymore, but she was busy weaving, and it was harder for her to keep track of him here, with all these people. Alfric had found Edmund and offered to teach him how to whittle better. But as Alfric watched him work a stick with his pocketknife, he quietly asked Edmund how he’d like to go on a journey to go and learn in a monastery.

“Like at Whitby?” Edmund had asked. Alfric’s life as a soldier had taken him further outside the village than anyone else Edmund knew. He’d been farther than the big city at Jorvik, and one night, he’d told Edmund all about visiting the ruined church at Whitby, where the monks had lived before the Northmen had slaughtered them all.

“Farther than Whitby,” Alfric had said. “Out of Northumbria. Out of England, even. Past Hadrian’s wall, into the Pictish lands and the mountains.”

Edmund had shivered and drawn closer to the fire. Why would anyone travel so far? “What would I learn there?” he said. “I couldn’t be a monk, could I?”

Alfric shrugged. “Maybe you could. But no, it’s not really a monastery exactly. It’s a special place for people like you.”

“What do you mean,” said Edmund, “people like me?”

“Witches,” said Alfric, simply.

“I’m not a _witch_ ,” said Edmund, and spat into the straw at their feet. He spoke with such vehemence that some of the others nearby glanced over at him, and Alfric shot him a warning look. “Witches are godless heathens, and are going to hell, and _I’m_ not,” continued Edmund, with no less emotion but more quietly. “I say my prayers every night. I’m not a pagan or a witch, I’m not,” he said, and if his lip had wobbled a little, Alfric had done him the service of focusing on the wood in his hands and pretending not to notice it.

“What about those things you can do, then, Ed?” murmured Alfric. “Disappearing over fences? Being invisible to the raiders? Turning spoilt flour good?”

“But _I_ didn’t do those things,” said Edmund. He stopped and thought. “It’s not magic if you’re not doing it on purpose, is it? It’s like… being a saint.”

Alfric chuckled. “Do you think you’re a saint?” Edmund put his tongue out at him, and they’d both laughed. Then Alfric continued. “There are some men and women up there in Scotland. They can do some of the same things that you can, and more, and they started… well, it’s like a monastery, but it’s a little different. And it’s for people like you to go to and learn about magic. I know they’d love for a bright boy like you…” he trailed off.

Edmund looked at him suspiciously, knife set aside for now. The world Alfric was presenting to him was more fascinating by far than any shape he could conjure out of the wood. “How did you learn about this place? Have you ever been?” He examined Alfric with new eyes, trying to decide if _he_ looked like he worshipped old Gods or practised forbidden rites. “Are you a witch?” He whispered, curiosity getting the better of him.

“Of course not,” said Alfric with a smile. “No, I learnt about it from a man I was serving with in the King’s huskarls, back a good few years ago now. Godric. He was a witch, and a good man.” He stared into the spitting fire.

How silly could Edmund have been? If he was a huskarl, a man in arms to the king, there was _no_ way that this Godric could be a _bad_ witch. He reconsidered. Maybe there were _good_ witches, too. “What sort of magic did he do?” He asked.

“See this?” Alfric pulled up his sleeve and showed Edmund the scar that he and Osbert always begged to see properly. It was even longer than the glances Edmund had stolen at it, nearly up to his elbow, and had healed into a long white scar. Edmund reached out to touch it, and, amused, Alfric let him. Alfric was closer to the fire, so his arm was much warmer than Edmund’s hands – the scar was raised and felt strange to the touch. Edmund snatched his hands back, fascinated.

“We were on campaign in the marches, a long way from here,” said Alfric, “and the Welshmen were coming in like slaughter-wolves. One of them gave me that scar,” said Alfric, “and he knocked me to the ground. He’d kicked my axe away, and his sword was raised for the kill – and that’s when Godric saw him. Next thing I knew, the Welshman was flying ten feet in the air. Hit the nearest tree and he dropped to the ground stone dead, and Godric never even took so much as a step his way.” The old man’s voice had grown a little hoarse, and he wiped what might have been a tear, or might have been an itch.

“And he’s at this school?”

“He started it a while ago, him and some friends. He lives there sometimes, but he’s a true born Saxon, and I think it pains him to be away from England too long.”

“Did you ever see him again?” Asked Edmund breathlessly. If he got to be like Godric, a Huskarl and a warrior _and_ a good Christian witch, he wanted to be a witch very badly.

Alfric took a deep breath, shaking his head. “Not me. I didn’t have the stomach for war, not the way Godric did. And he’s as old as me, older, maybe, but I carry the years heavier in my bones. He stayed on under Harold of Wessex. He’s an important man, now, he’s in the Witenagemot, has the ear of the king. I came North and ended up here.”

After that, Edmund had been all for going to learn at Godric’s school. Granny was still very against it, though, and he didn’t dare even bring it up with her, so he’d spent the whole long winter hoping that Alfric would say the right thing to persuade her. But winter slowly turned to spring, and even as the village ploughed and planted the fields, Alfric and Granny still weren’t talking. The hawthorn budded and new leaves came out, and they still didn’t exchange a word. That spring, they heard word that King Edward had gone to God, leaving no children. There were many who claimed to be the true heir, but the Witenagemot, the king’s council, had met and decided that Harold Godwinson of Wessex would be king now. Edmund remembered that Alfric had once served with him, that he talked of his days on campaign fighting the Welsh with Harold, and he wanted to ask him about their new king. But somehow, Granny always found something for him to do if it looked like he was going to talk to the old man.

By the autumn the fleet came, it had been more than a year since Edmund had even done any magic, and neither Alfric nor Granny had said anything more to him or each other about it. He still wanted desperately to meet Godric, but there was always something to do: there were crops to harvest, and the sow had given birth to a litter of piglets. There was the river to cool off in at the end of long, hot days, and there were riddles to solve in the hall with the grown-ups. Granny wouldn’t allow any talk of it, and there was little reason to try any magic, not just yet.

* * *

The dragon ships marched down the river, and Edmund looked at Osbert, eyes wide with panic and all the taboos of moments ago forgotten. He was trying desperately to find some muscle in himself he didn’t know he had, to repeat the mysterious thing he’d somehow done once before. 

But whatever had set the magic coursing through him last time wouldn’t come. There were no words that sprung to his tongue, no hidden muscle that moved; just him and Osbert standing, staring at each other in mute fear, until finally, without either saying they were making the decision, they ran, hauling themselves up on the bank and flying with all the speed they could muster to the village. Edmund wished he knew how to make them invisible, how to summon that witch-speed he’d brought on one before, but all he had were his own two feet pounding on the earth and his heart hammering in his chest.

A hot stream of tears ran down Edmund’s face. Every step seemed to snatch his breath away, and all he could see when he closed his eyes was the endless sails, the swarm of mast after mast. A year ago, when he’d turned invisible, there had been one longboat. Now, there were too many to count. When they reached the first houses, Edmund doubled over, too winded to speak, but Osbert started shouting as soon as there were people in sight. “Raiders!” He shouted, and people came running at his voice, dropping tools leaving fires unattended. “Raiders, more boats than ever before, scores, hundreds…”

Edmund felt a bony elbow nudge him and looked up. “Is this true?” Granny was at his side, hunched over her walking stick and so only barely taller than him. He nodded, trying to get his breath back.

“Coming upriver,” he said, “we both saw them, we…”

Granny wrapped her arms around him, and he thought for a moment that she was comforting him, but then he felt her shoulders shake and realized that she was crying, too. He didn’t know what to do. Children cried, and grown-ups comforted them. The grownups weren’t supposed to cry too, weren’t supposed to cry at all. He took a deep, shuddering breath. Around them, the commotion and shouting was growing louder, so he clung to his Granny and tried to shut out the village in uproar around them.

“What do we do?” he sniffled. The last raid had been scary, but no one had really been hurt – and with his magic, if that was truly what it was, he’d never been in any danger. But even if he’d had all the magic in the world, if he’d gone to Godric’s school for a hundred years, he didn’t think he could keep everyone safe against the Vikings coming down the river.

She sighed and took her arms from around him. His tears were still flowing, but hers had stopped, and her old, sunken eyes were only a little red. She paused, looking him up and down, before replying, considering her words carefully.

“Find Alfric,” she said, and every word seemed to be costing her a terrible price. “Find Alfric and tell him I’ve said it’s time.”

“What am I doing with Alfric?” asked Edmund, worried. Was he to be given a sword? Fight the raiders? Surely not. But she couldn’t possibly mean-

“He’s to take you to that monastery school. For your…” She paused, unable to say the word. “For what you can do. You’ll leave now, and go fast.”

“And you’ll come too?” said Edmund, staring at her.

For all he’d hoped, and wished, and dreamed of learning to be a witch and a huskarl, of travelling far and wide with his magic, Edmund had never imagined a future without Granny there. They needed each other. But Granny just stood, hunched over her stick, looking older than ever.

“I’m not fit to travel to market, Ed,” she said, with what looked like an attempt at a smile, “let alone all that way North.”

“But if you stay here, the raiders-“

“Never you mind them,” she said, giving his arm a squeeze. “We’ll make do. We have before.”

“But-“

“ _Go_ , Edmund.” She turned, and, painstakingly slowly, began to shuffle away. “Go and find Alfric.”

“Granny!”

She turned and looked at him. Around them, people were running, bundling what little they had and heading for the woods. She looked impossibly old, then, withered and slow. Was he imagining it, or did her hands shake a little? How could she carry anything, let alone run to the forest, let alone hide?

“Go,” she said, hoarsely. As she stood there, she was blurring through his tears. “Go with Alfric. Be good. Learn everything you can.” He tried to think of something to say, the tears coming hot and fast and blocking out everything but streaks of light, but he couldn’t put any of this enormity into words. He let out a quiet sob, and balled his fists up, pressing them to his eyes, willing the tears away so he could at least see her properly. “God be with you, Edmund,” she said.

Alfric had found him, in the end. Edmund had looked for him, but he’d looked for him amid a stampede of panicked grownups. He was lost in a maze of long, running legs. He could hardly see his way through the maze anyway; people were running from house to house, throwing water on the fires so the smoke wouldn’t be visible, so thick, hot steam was blanketing everything and making his eyeballs prickle from the heat. The world was blurred and out of focus, hidden from him behind a blanket of still-running tears, and within a few minutes Edmund felt very small, scared and stupid. It was as he was wandering, disoriented, miserable, that he’d hands under his arms raise him up, and Alfric had swung him up onto his bony shoulders as if he weighed nothing more than a bag of grain.

“Alright, lad. Time for us to be going North.”

Edmund didn’t say anything. There were no words left in him, anyway. Alfric had set a slow, steady pace, and they’d left the village; not to the woods to the west, but North.

* * *

Within a day, Edmund no longer recognized the path they were on anymore, and the bag of food Alfric had taken with them was gone. “The woods will have our dinner,” Alfric had said. He hadn’t used many words since they’d left, but the words he did speak were slow and gentle, like he’d use to a panicked horse. Edmund, who had said nothing at all since they’d left, didn’t mind that.

Alfric had shown him the mushrooms they could eat and had bidden him still while he knocked down a hare with his slingshot – Edmund watched silently, and helped to gut and skin the creature silently. He hadn’t said a word as they’d cooked and eaten it, not even a yelp when the boiling hot juices had scalded the roof of his mouth.

They slept under the stars, Edmund’s teeth chattering even wrapped in his blanket. After the first nightmare, he was glad of the cold – the less he slept, the less time he had to dream about Osbert, about Granny and the Danes and their terrible long swords. In the morning, when they walked, Alfric loped with long strides, and Edmund struggled to keep up. He shook his head when Alfric asked if he wanted to be carried; he knew they had a long way to go, and Granny had told him to be good, so he should be good and walk.

By noon, they’d reached a little market town, and Alfric had found a horse trader. The trader had huffed, and puffed, and fussed, and shown them horses even Edmund could tell were barely fit for anything other than stew. Then, Alfric had brought out a pouch of silver that Edmund stared at, wide-eyed: it contained more money than he’d ever seen in his entire life. “Not bad, is it?” Alfric whispered to Edmund. He didn’t seem to expect Edmund to reply, not anymore, and Edmund was happy with that.

The trader went wide eyed, and suddenly he seemed to have a lot more horses to sell, better horses. They left town soon after in a cart pulled by a mare, young and strong, and with a bag filled with bread and dried mutton. The bag of silver was much lighter.

When they could, they slept in barns or churches. But there were plenty more nights shivering under the stars by the embers of a fire. Edmund hadn’t seen many autumns, but he’d seen enough to know that there shouldn’t be this much of a chill in the air, not this early in the year; but the further they travelled, the colder the nights got.

Every few days, they would pass through a town or a village. Alfric would talk to people: he would trade a little more of the money for food, and he would ask for directions to make sure they were headed on the right path. Edmund would hide in the back of the cart, trying to shrink; he didn’t think he could disappear by magic anymore, so he would have to make himself as small as possible. As the days went on, the accents of the people Alfric would ask for directions grew harsher, more incomprehensible, and the words they had in common were fewer and fewer; eventually, he and Edmund were reduced to navigating on guesswork and half-forgotten memories, and food was whatever Alfric could catch or find.

How long that took, Edmund couldn’t quite say, because he was losing track of the days quickly. Granny had taught him to count, and to count well, but one day on the road blurred into another: the nights got longer, more rains came, and before long he didn’t know if it had been one week or two since he’d left Granny, if it had been one day or five since he’d last been dry. They travelled in silence, mostly, the only sounds the mare’s hoofbeats or the squeak and rattle of the wheels. Sometimes, Alfric would sing a song, his voice echoing among lonely hills. Occasionally, he’d recite a few minutes of an old poem, something about warriors and glory in battle, and Edmund liked to hear the rhythm of the words, liked the ringing of the melody in Alfric’s creaky old voice. But soon enough Alfric would stop, happy to continue in silence, and Edmund still felt like when the Vikings had come, they’d snatched his voice away as they snatched the church’s silver. He couldn’t ask for more; he would have to be content with the singing of wheel and road, horse and harness.

When they arrived, Edmund was asleep in the back of the cart. He’d been sleeping more and more, the days rushing together in a mix of cold and damp, of jolting motion and the hard, cold earth. When the cart stopped, he raised his head fuzzily. They were stopped by a huge black lake, the sun just beginning to go down and throw brilliant colours and long shadows across the water. Ahead of them was a palisade wall, and behind it, columns of smoke rose. Food had been scarce the last few days, warmth for much longer, and even the slightest hint of woodsmoke and cooked food made Edmund’s stomach gripe uncomfortably.

Ahead of them were tall wooden gates, shut firmly closed. Alfric hopped down from the cart and saw Edmund was awake. He nodded at him.

“Looks like we’re here,” he said, “and not a moment too soon.” He pointed out over the water. “There’s a nasty storm brewing.” It was true: above the walls were towers of sulky yellow cloud, mutinously building and boiling. There was a tension in the air that only thunder could break, and Edmund thought how, in weather like this, his granny would tell him that she felt the thunder coming in her bones. He shuddered, shaking his head and swinging his legs over the cart: he wished he hadn’t thought about Granny. He hoped that wherever she was, her, and Hilda and Osbert and all the other people who’d made up the whole of his life until a few weeks ago, they were dry.

Suddenly, a harsh rattle of words Edmund didn’t understand startled him, making him stumble as he tried to set foot on the ground. Had he gone so long without speaking that he’d simply lost all the words he knew? He looked to Alfric, scared, but Alfric was staring at the gate.

In front of it was a man who had most certainly not been there before. He looked old, impossibly old. He was barely even wrinkled: instead, the weathered skin of his face was stretched thin over his skull, surrounding tiny, sunken eyes that surveyed the two of them with a keen interest. He was completely bald, his liver-spotted head shining like eggshell, but snow-white hair bristled above his eyes and swept down from his chin in a beard that nearly reached to the ground. While Alfric had a stoop to his shoulders, and Granny, the oldest person Edmund had ever met, hunched nearly double, the man in front of them stood as straight as a man of twenty. He was dressed in rags, loose and flowing around him in the wind, some more worn than others, but all in black – no, Edmund realized, not just black. There were greens in there, dark and nearly blending in, and then occasionally as they rustled around him, there would be a single flash of something brilliant and verdant. Edmund shivered: he looked like every heathen witch he had ever imagined.

He spoke in another rattle of words that Edmund didn’t understand. His voice cracked like an old, dead tree, wearing the weight of its years heavy on it, but these words were different from the last; they flowed like honey, stumbling over each other. As he spoke, his eyes moved from Alfric to Edmund, who shrank from his gaze, to Alfric again.

“That’s Welsh, that is,” Alfric muttered, and Edmund felt a wave of relief; he _hadn’t_ forgotten how to speak after all. “Don’t understand a word of it, mind, but I heard plenty of it on the marches…” Edmund reached for Alfric’s hand and grasped it; the leathery skin of the man, the only person he knew in all the world, now, was warm and reassuring.

“English, then?” The man said. The words were so heavily accented that for a moment, Edmund still didn’t recognize them. He didn’t wait for a reply, and continued, “you are a long way from home, Englishman.”

Alfric puffed his chest out. “I am Alfric, and this-“ Edmund squirmed at the stranger’s attention fixing on him, “is Edmund. We are seeking Godric Gryffindor.”

“Are you indeed?” The old man looked amused, and Edmund couldn’t help noticing he had not given his own name in turn. “I am looking for him also. Perhaps we may find him together?”

“This is… is this the school he founded?”

“He and others.” The old man reached out towards the gate, and the wrist that slipped out from the masses of fabric around him was even more withered than his face. He snapped two thin, emaciated fingers, and the huge gates began to swing inward on their hinges as if they weighed nothing at all. _I was right,_ Edmund thought as he watched him slip through the gates to a courtyard within, _he’s a witch. A_ _witch like me_. It was not an entirely comfortable comparison. He wasn’t sure he wanted to have anything in common with this stranger, this walking skeleton with an uncomfortable smile.

“Come,” said the man, beckoning them over the threshold with those same long, outstretched brittle fingers. “Welcome to Hogwarts.”


	2. To March on the Throne

The gates led to a wide circular courtyard, laden with cobbles that were just starting to spot with the first drops of rain from the storm clouds above. Around it stood a variety of long, low wooden buildings, roofed with thick thatch. The courtyard was empty of all people, but all Edmund saw were the plumes of smoke coming from chimneys and smoke-holes: the promise of food and of warmth would have brought him in here even without their appointment to find the fabled Godric.

“I shall have a groom sent to attend to your horse,” said the stranger, beckoning them onwards, though the courtyard was deserted. “For now, I have ensured that she will stay dry.”

“Please,” said Alfric, who Edmund was clinging to like a barnacle by now. He’d been nervous of the people, of a whole school full of witches, but somehow, he found the lack of anyone at all much more unnerving. “She’s been good to us, hasn’t she, Ed? Seen us travel a long way.”

Edmund nodded mutely. The stranger, in no particular hurry, was leading them across the courtyard to the largest of the buildings, but Edmund felt his gaze shift onto him. Under the gaze of those eyes, he found himself wishing he could go invisible again. “Who has the gift,” said the man, “yourself, or the boy?”

“The boy, sir.” Alfric seemed wary of this man, too, but where Edmund wanted to hide, Alfric seemed to be treating him with a deference Edmund hadn’t seen from him before. Alfric, hero, huskarl, who always held his head high, was treating this stranger dressed in swirling black rags with the respect due to a lord. Edmund didn’t like it. “He’s shown a few signs over the years. I served with Godric, sir, a long time ago, and he told me about this place. Told me to bring anyone here who had the gift. Thought I’d bring the boy to him, see if he could learn anything.”

“And this boy – Edmund, you said?”

“Yes, sir,” continued Alfric. They had stopped now, in the centre of the courtyard. Under the gaze of the witch, Edmund was seized with an urge to run, to get away from this man; but where would he go? To have come so far to find others with magic, to have gone so long to seek food and shelter, and to run now would be foolish. He was in strange country; it was near dark and there was a storm coming… and yet something inside him was screaming that he wanted to get as far away from this man as possible.

“Is he mute?” The stranger asked. Edmund considered. _Was_ he mute? He certainly hadn’t uttered a word since Alfric took him from the village, since he’d said goodbye to Granny. But he _could_ talk. There was nothing wrong with his mouth, with his tongue. But what was there to say, now, when he would never see any of them again? Not Osbert, not Hilda, not Granny. He’d left all of them to the raiders. What more words _could_ he speak?

“Seems that way, sir,” said Alfric. 

“I see,” said the stranger. “We will do what we can, of course, but so much of our magic is spoken that that may prove a problem.” He looked Edmund up and down, and Edmund was uncomfortably reminded of Alfric inspecting the horses back at the beginning of their journey. “Has he ever spoken?” He didn’t wait for Alfric to respond and seemed to be talking more to himself than to anyone else. “No matter. Perhaps the healers can help. Perhaps not. Tell me, do the boy’s parents have magic?”

“I’ve never met them, sir,” said Alfric. “Both long departed, I’m afraid.” Edmund thought. He hadn’t known either of his parents, not really. His mother had died bringing him into the world, and the raid when his father had been killed had been within the first year of his life. Granny had never _told_ him that either of them had been witches. But then again, she had never wanted to talk about his magic. For all he knew, they’d both been great witches, slaying the Danes with spells like Godric, able to do all sorts of great works… _But then_ , said a treacherous voice in the back of his head, coming over him like the lengthening shadows stealing across the courtyard, _if they were so magical, they couldn’t have died, could they?_

“I see, I see.” The witch had a horrible knack for examining Edmund in a way that made him squirm while, at the same time, talking about him like he wasn’t there. No, he realised, not like he wasn’t there, but like he simply couldn’t understand him. Like he was an interesting fish – beautiful, to be praised and evaluated and bought and sold, but, in the end, destined for the net, the hook, to be gutted and hung up to dry.

The rain was beginning to fall more heavily now, but Edmund realised with a shudder that he wasn’t feeling any of it. The old man had done _something_ , and while a few minutes ago he would have given anything to be dry, he felt decidedly uneasy with whatever magic had made this happen. But however dry he felt, he saw the rain coming down in front of him, saw the cobbles becoming slick and the tiny rivers and runnels beginning to form between stones. “Beg your pardon, sir,” Alfric said, “but where are all the other people? The witches? Shouldn’t we be finding them?”

“Of course. My apologies, I have been a little distracted – I arrived at the same time as you, and I have not been in the community for some time.” The man gave a weak smile. “It is Vespers. They will be at prayer in the chapel.” He indicated towards one of the buildings, which Edmund thought looked no different from the others. “Perhaps you would care to join them? I am afraid we have probably missed most of the mass.”

The doors to the chapel were heavy, unadorned oak, but as they slipped in, Edmund looked on in wonder.

On the altar stood a crucifix covered in more gold than he had ever seen in his life, glinting in the light of seemingly endless candles. After his months on the road, he could hardly tell what was the greater wonder: that that much brightness and light could burn in one place, or that each candle floated in the air, not in any candlestick holder or lantern, but bobbing gently up and down unsupported.

Perhaps two hundred people were kneeling within – men, women, and children of around his age and older. They were mostly dressed in simple robes of brown and faded black: there was no one dressed like the stranger who was accompanying them in.

“ _da nobis hodie, et dimitte nobis debita nostra_ -“ the room was repeating in rote, and Edmund felt his lips moving along automatically, although no words would come. But at the opening of the door, the prayer faltered and stopped. A lone figure at the front continued, in a reedy voice, but everyone else was turned to look at the stranger escorting in the newcomers. Edmund did his best to hide behind Alfric’s heavy cloak.

“Godric!” Proclaimed their guide, his strangely accented voice echoing around the floating candles.

“ _debitoribus nostris, et ne nos inducas in-_ “ even the thin voice of the priest trailed off, as a man at the front of the church stood and turned around. This, surely, was Godric, Edmund thought as he peeked around Alfric at him. This was who they had travelled for weeks to find. He was enormously tall, broad shouldered and stood proud. Alfric had said he was as old as him, but his hair and cropped beard were still flame bright, his face only a little lined. He strode down the chapel’s aisle, arms open to embrace the wizened man in front of them.

“Salazar!” Godric cried, a huge, booming voice. All around him, the other people in the church – the other _witches_ , Edmund thought with a delicious shiver – were turning to each other, a cavalcade of whispers spreading. “You came wind-bound? Great God, you came just in time, man, there’s a storm brewing!” His eyes, quick and clever, darted past the ancient man and passed over Edmund and stopped on Alfric. “And you’ve brought me… no, it can’t be…”

He had paused partway down the aisle, the embrace never completed. Salazar – and what kind of a name was _that_ , Edmund thought – had not moved an inch towards him. “I come with ill tidings, Godric,” he rasped, ignoring everything that had come before. Godric frowned, looked at him questioningly. “Harold Godwinson is dead,” said Salazar. “The King of England has fallen.”

“No!” A voice broke out as the whispers around the room became a torrent. Edmund looked for who had spoken before realising from the scratched, alien feeling in his throat that it had been him who had cried out.

Salazar turned to him, those uncomfortable eyes staring straight through Edmund. “Perhaps he is not so mute after all,” he said, giving Alfric a smile that sent a shiver down Edmund’s spine. _How can he be worrying about whether I can speak or not at a time like this_? Edmund thought. “Godwinson was killed in battle,” Salazar continued, turned back to Godric with his voice even and measured against the hubbub breaking out across the room. “Guillame the Bastard of Normandy is marching on London, primed to seize the throne.”

Edmund stared. How did Salazar know these things? How could King Harold possibly have died, and died to a _Norman_? Godric stepped back from Salazar, eyes wide with fear, or maybe something else, as Salazar’s voice rang out through the chapel. Edmund realized that while he was talking to Godric, he was making sure everyone there could hear him, his weak, rasping voice somehow ringing louder and more true than the priest had ever managed. “I saw it with my own eyes, Godric. This isn’t just prophecy, I was _there -_ Harold struck down by archers at Hastings, the huskarls crumpling under the weight of Norman knights – Guillame will be crowned in Westminster within months.” His eyes flicked to Godric like an adder’s, and Edmund thought he saw something in them. Maybe pity, but Edmund thought he detected something else there, some kind of excitement. He shivered.

“But how…” Godric looked lost, a huge, powerful man somehow looking like a child. “Harold, dead in battle?” The hubbub that had been growing around the room was gone, now – every man, woman and child was frozen, silent, watching the fate of the English throne unfold between the two men.

“King Harold was exhausted. He was weakened.” Whatever trace of pity there had been in Salazar’s face, there was none now. “A month prior, some ten thousand Danes sailed upriver into Northumbria.” Edmund’s stomach flipped, and he was glad there was nothing in it but yesterday’s hare meat, because he felt sick to his stomach now. Those ships he’d seen filling the river to the horizon – they’d been carrying ten _thousand_ Danes? There was no way that anyone in the village could have… he stopped the thought, not ready to face it, not yet. Not when Salazar was still speaking. “Harold crushed them at Stamford Bridge, then had his men march South, to meet Guillame. No rest, precious few supplies. They were dead men walking long before they reached Hastings.”

Edmund’s eyes were filling and distorting the church around him, making it blur, making each candle flame turn into long spears of light. In front of him, Alfric swallowed, hard – Alfric had served with Harold, had known him. Edmund clung onto his cloak, but wasn’t sure if it was for his own comfort, or Alfric’s. Godric spoke for all three of them, then. “Harold… Harold gone. England fallen.” All the weight of the enormous man gathered into a huge sigh. “Salazar, what do we do?”

“Do we need to _do_ anything?” Someone else was talking at the front of the church, a woman, in a harsh, grating voice that Edmund had trouble understanding. She had masses of grey hair and a round, pleasant face that nevertheless looked worried. “ _Godric_ can do what he pleases,” she said, “the English can do what they please, but I will remind all of you that we are not _in_ England. Harold of Wessex was no king of mine, and nor will Guillame be.” She fixed Salazar and Godric with a determined gaze. “I am sure, Salazar, that this is an important matter, but it is hardly a matter for the entire community to act upon.”

Quiet fell through the chapel, and through the blur of his tears, Edmund could see pale, worried faces were turned towards Salazar. The old man took a deep breath. “Guillame will not stop with the throne of England. Normandy and England cannot be enough for him – when he is crowned, it can only be a matter of time before his men turn to the Welsh marches, before he eyes a new kingdom in the North, Helga. There is a need to act, and a need to act soon.”

“Then what would you have me do?” Godric’s voice was already clearer, as if the resolve of action – any action – was giving him strength. Edmund felt fabric slip through his fingers, and realized that without a word, Alfric had stepped aside, and that he was standing with Godric now.

“Godric, I would have you take up arms, march on London, and become king.”

Edmund had thought that the church was quiet up until now, but it was a cacophony in comparison with the silence that followed Salazar’s words. Godric looked at him, uncertain, Alfric standing at his side. “Salazar…” Godric said, a shake in his voice. “I cannot.”

“You _must._ Imagine it. A land where we have true power, where we do not have to hide away here. Those with gifts would come to us, could be taught – we would no longer be riding the length and breadth of Albion to find them, they would be brought _willingly_. No more whispers, Godric. No more quiet words to kings and bishops, no, a witch could sit upon the throne and everyone in Christendom would know our _power_.” Salazar was shaking now, but not with cold, not with fear – that flicker of excitement Edmund had spotted had grown to a burning fire now, and that flame was lighting the room far brighter than the flame-haired Godric. “I have travelled far enough to see what happens to places the Normans touch. If you allow Guillame to stay on the throne,” he continued, “he will tear apart England piece by piece for Norman hands. English children will grow up speaking a Norman tongue. He will disband the Witenagemot, Godric. Men like him do not think they need the advice of those they think are beneath him, and then who, truly, will hold him back? But with you on the throne? We could have a witches council to advise you. A wizengamot. We could mould the world in our image, make it better, make it _stronger_.”

“Why _me_?” asked Godric. “I do not come from royalty. I have no right to the throne, I do not _want_ the throne; if this is your plan for a better world, Salazar, why not take the throne for yourself and leave me out of this?”

“Me?” Salazar laughed, and I was a hollow sound, bouncing on the flagstones of the chapel. “Godric, I am too old, too foreign, too much a witch by far. Guillame may be a bastard, and a Norman, but he is a man who looks like a king and in time, perhaps the English will surrender themselves to him – but they would never be ruled by me. But you, Godric? Proud Saxon? Huskarl? Brother in arms to Harold, hammer of the Welshmen, ten years on the Witenagemot? You are a man born to be King of England, and the people will know it.” _He’s right_ , thought Edmund. The floating candle’s lit Godric with a strange glow, making it almost appear as if he had a halo – he looked like a king. He looked like a saint. The flickering candlelight across Salazar’s face threw such deep shadows across his sunken eyes that he looked more like a corpse.

“I…” Godric was trying to stand firm amid the barrage of Salazar’s words. “I am not a man suited for the throne.”

“You could be,” Salazar interjected. “A devoted comrade of Harold’s, beloved by all Englishfolk for saving them from the false king? Why, with the right advisors-“

“Damn it, Salazar, _listen_! I don’t want to rule. But even if I did… it doesn’t matter. I have no royal claim. I have no claim, no title to speak of, no army-“

“And you do not need them,” the old man said, “when you have power, Godric. Not with me at your side, Rowena, Helga-“

“When we founded this community, Salazar, I do not remember agreeing to join in anyone’s personal wars,” said the woman Edmund supposed was Helga, rising to her feet.

“As for an army,” Salazar continued, unhearing, “you have every good Saxon here at Hogwarts.”

“Mere dozens!” Godric was shouting, his whole body turned to Salazar. It seemed to Edmund that while the church was full of people, while he was standing in the doorway and Alfric was at Godric’s side, the only people who were _really_ there were Godric and Salazar; even Helga seemed barely-there compared to the two men. “Mere dozens, many of them women, many children – I cannot march on London, Salazar, I have no claim and no one with whom to press it! Even the strongest witch cannot face down the entire Norman army.”

“I have an army for you.” For the first time, Salazar’s voice was quiet, and Edmund strained to hear him. “I have men for you in their thousands, noble Saxons all, and ready to follow your every word. All you must do, Godric, is step up and take their command.”

“How? Where?” Godric looked around as if half expecting Salazar to conjure an army up from thin air.

“As I said, the Danes swept into Northumbria.” The old man’s voice had turned to honey, each word dripping slowly into the church. “Ten thousand Danes, sweeping their way through the English countryside. I heard they near burned Scarborough to the ground. And then of course there are the good English dead from where King Harold fought the Danes, and indeed from Hastings itself…”

Godric was struck mute, but Helga walked down the aisle towards the two men. “What are you saying, Salazar?” she asked. It felt as though the church all inhaled together.

“A few spells, that’s all it would take. A few spells, and the bodies of English dead can rise up with Godric as their leader. _Think_ on it!” Salazar took the few steps to Godric, brushing Alfric aside as if he were nothing, and Edmund could see Salazar’s skeletal fingers grip Godric’s arm tight. “An army to do our bidding, an army that would never complain of long marches, who we would not need to feed, to clothe…and with us at their head. Guillame the bastard wouldn’t stand a chance. Our own kingdom… Godric, can you not imagine?”

The great breath that had been inhaled around the room was still there, held, waiting. When Godric finally spoke, he spoke with the air of a man finally waking up from a long, confusing dream. “I have imagined it, Salazar,” he said slowly. “And it is against _God_.”

“It is not…”

But the huge man had no time for Salazar’s protestations. “You would desecrate the dead for this? This madcap scheme for yourself to sit behind the throne?”

“Godric is right, Salazar-“ Helga cautioned, stepping closer to the two men. Alfric had stepped back to be with Edmund now, his open palms held up, and Edmund found himself buried into the old man’s side. If he breathed in deeply, he liked to imagine that he could still smell something of home clinging to the old man. If he closed his eyes, maybe he could be back in that life, with its small, familiar problems – not here, where terrifying witches talked of an army of ten thousand Danes plundering everything in their path, of England fallen, and of ungodly magic to make the dead rise again. _Granny was right,_ Edmund thought, and screwed his eyes tight shut – but however much he wanted to shut this out, he couldn’t miss a moment of it, and a second later he found himself peeking out through his lashes.

“Godric,” Salazar said, stepping back, “Harold would not want the throne to be-“

“Do not speak to me of what Harold would want!” Godric bellowed, and then there was a large crack, and a blinding light. Edmund could swear his eyes were open again, but he couldn’t see anything for some seconds – by the time his eyes stopped burning, Godric was wielding a sword in one hand, and something small in the other, perhaps a dagger? It was all moving too fast to see. Salazar stood unarmed. The redhaired man was lunging at Salazar, all words between the two of them forgotten now. Edmund had seen sparring before, had seen Alfric and the other older men teaching those a few years older than him to wield a sword. But these weren’t those careful, testing blows: Godric was striking to kill, and Salazar carried no weapon but was unafraid…

Salazar gave a gentle flick of his hand, and the blow glanced off thin air, leaving him unharmed. Godric, undeterred, lunged again, but with the dagger now, and Edmund saw that it wasn’t a dagger, it was a simple stick of wood. But Godric shouted something, some strange oath, and bolts of light flew from the stick towards Salazar, who was still swatting them away but less confidently now, more focused. Salazar said something and suddenly the small distance between the two men was taken up by a great serpent, impossibly large, tongue flicking. Edmund screamed, and he wasn’t the only one: the witches of the church had scattered, many of them backed against the altar at the front of the room, panic everywhere. Helga, however, stood fast, watching, calculating.

Godric struck a mighty blow toward the serpent with his sword, and the serpent shattered into sparks that played along the blade. Both men lunged forward again, shouting words Edmund couldn’t begin to understand, and then-

“Enough!” Cried a voice, a new voice, and all the candle flames died at once, plunging the chapel into darkness and blessed quiet.

The voice came from behind him, clear, ringing, with a strange lilt that sounded familiar but that he couldn’t quite place; and then there was the sweeping of a gown along the ground, and as the candle flames flickered up to life again, a woman was walking past him. She was tall and incredibly slender, with long, flowing brown locks of hair – and around her head was a thin circlet of delicate silver. Edmund stared at her. Did the witches have a queen? Surely this was her, in her crown; she strode like a queen, with contempt for the very ground beneath her feet. In the church, Godric’s sword and the other, stranger weapon were scattered on the ground. Neither he nor Salazar made a move for them: both of them had been knocked down and were lying frozen, sheepish under this new scrutiny.

The room quickly began to unfreeze. One of the other witches in the church, a girl who couldn’t have been more than a few years older than Edmund, ran to the newcomer, picking her way through people and moving straight past the two duellists without a look. “Mother!” she cried, and buried her face in her sweeping gown.

Alfric, meanwhile, had rushed from behind Edmund to Godric, helping him up, and the two men embraced and shared words Edmund strained to hear above the hubbub of the room beginning to unthaw, the near frantic mutters of everyone trying to unpick what they had just seen.

“What is the meaning of this, Godric? Salazar?” The new arrival’s voice rang clear and true, cutting a new silence into the growing tumult. “A duel, here? Is this not-“ the woman’s face formed a smile, as if she somehow found the situation faintly amusing, “a place of God? Surely you cannot mean to despoil- “

“Do not talk to me, Rowena, of despoiling-“ Godric began. Alfric had helped him to his feet and was standing between him and Salazar, but what good could Alfric do as a shield between two such men? Edmund thought of the serpent, of the bolts of crackling fire, and shivered.

“Enough,” Rowena said. She turned her attention to the people of the church, mostly pressed as far towards the back of the room as possible. “Leave us. The four founders would speak alone.”

It was as if the congregation had been frozen in place by a long winter, and Rowena’s words were the spring. The thaw began quickly and within moments, a crush of people flowed towards the door. They each had to pass Godric, Helga, Rowena and Salazar, but everyone wanted to stay as far from them as possible: a crush of strange witches flowed around the walls of the chapel, making for the door with quiet, worried mutters to each other and streaming into the courtyard. Edmund found himself moving with this tide of people, buffeted from stranger to stranger until he was outside the church. He looked out through a crowd of strange faces and tried to see if the horse that had taken he and Alfric all this way was still there – but it was gone. _Maybe the people carried her away, too,_ thought Edmund, doing his best not to get trampled amid the crowds. He could barely see the door to the church now – he strained to peek through the maze of legs and bodies and thought he might have caught sight of it, but perhaps that was one of the other doors facing into the courtyard, one of the other buildings holding who knows what witch secrets…

He was crying again, quietly: not the crying of a child who expected to be heard and comforted, because who was there now to do that? He was crying with the steady, inevitable tears of weeks pouring down on him, and as the crowds out of the church began to thin, he sat down on the cold ground, hunched over, tears flowing freely. Ten thousand Norsemen, coming up the river, looting, burning. King Harold had stopped them, but too late for Edmund’s village. Too late for Osbert, for Hilda. Too late for Granny. They were all dead, and now King Harold was dead too, and a bastard called Guillame was going to be king: and here he was, weeks and weeks from home, hungry, cold and very, very lost.

He didn’t know how long he sat on the ground before he felt the hand on his shoulder. He looked up, wiping his eyes with his filthy sleeve, and Alfric was standing over him, offering a hand.

“Come on, lad.” Edmund tried to reach up to him and pull himself up, but he was unsteady: Alfric simply bent down and picked him up, placing him over one shoulder exactly like he had back when they’d first left the village.

“Can we stay?” asked Edmund. He was surprised the words came so easily now, and his voice felt as exhausted as the rest of him from long disuse.

“Of course. Let’s get you some food,” said the older man, and he began to walk Edmund to one of the other doors. There was a gnawing pang in Edmund’s belly, a hunger for real food instead of the meagre harvest of days on the road, but he was so tired, so utterly bone weary, that he couldn’t tell if he’d be able to move his mouth enough to get the food inside him. 

“Alfric,” he said, and Edmund saw hearth-smoke threading from a chimney and thought longingly of the warmth waiting for him moments away. “Alfric, all those things Salazar said…”

There was a long pause, and Edmund wondered if he had detected a catch in Alfric’s breathing, or maybe some choked-back sob. “Best not to worry about it, boy. We’re with Godric now, and we’re in the best place for you. You’re safe here.” And as Alfric opened the doors a wave of light and warmth crept over him – and Edmund passed instantly into deep, exhausted sleep.


	3. So Much More Than Disappearing

**1073 Anno Domine**

The first Matilde learned of magic was on the night she started bleeding.

Matilde’s mother had been dead a long time, before Lord Jean’s household had even left Normandy, birthing a sister who hadn’t survived the night. If she was anyone’s concern, she was Lady Heloise’s – but there was no way the other servants would wake her for this. And why should they? A penniless serving girl, a motherless brat of uncertain fatherhood was no one’s concern at the best of times. As far as Lady Heloise and his Lordship were concerned, this orphan with a nose for trouble may as well have been a Saxon peasant – why disturb them for this? So when Matilde had woken up and screamed, convinced she was dying by the blood on the straw around her, it had been Marie the lady’s maid who had given her water and rags to clean herself. Anne and Isabeau, his lordship’s twin girls, had laughed at her, and Matilde thought she’d caught a look in the cook’s eye that she’d have hell to pay for waking the hall so early. But Marie had barely said a word to her as she’d roughly led her out of the hall and taken her down the hall’s stone steps and out into the breaking dawn.

Matilde was scared the moment they entered the village. Those at the manor had no kindness for her, but she at least knew them and knew what cruelties were coming. The Saxons were another matter entirely. When she was younger, in the years after they first came to England, there were Saxon children she’d played with. She’d run around the village with the general rabble, for all the snooty looks Anne and Isabeau had given her, and even picked up quite a bit of the English tongue. She might have come with Lord Jean and his soldiers, she might have been a Norman, but she was just a kid, and that was enough.

It hadn’t lasted. As the Saxon boys and girls got older, they started to listen to the grumblings of their parents, and began to draw back from Matilde. Matilde, who had no parents to listen to, was hurt and confused at first. But then word hit the village about what had happened in the North, about the Saxons who’d taken up arms against King Guillame, and how the king’s men had ridden through villages and killed every man, woman and child with no care for who had taken up arms. She understood then with a horrible clarity. Who held the sword, who rode to battle, did not matter. She would have no friend or ally in the village, and if she were equally alone in the manor? That was for her to deal with. So as Marie dragged her by the arm to the village, Matilde shrunk back. Was she so sick, so diseased, she was to be left with the peasants to die?

But rather than leaving her slumped and bleeding in the square, as Matilde half expected, Marie took her towards the edge of town to a small house there. Smoke was coming from the chimney: whoever lived inside was awake, despite the hour. Marie knocked roughly, and in a moment the door was opened by a woman. She was old, with grey hair flying around her face and a back bent nearly double, but she moved without a stick and looked at Marie and the cowering Matilde curiously.

“Matilde. Servant, got around fifteen winters on her and she’s a woman now,” said Marie to the old woman in English that sounded clipped and unnatural coming from her mouth. “Started her bleeding last night and made an almighty fuss. It’s a mother’s task to explain, and she has none, so you can explain what’s what to her.” She turned to Marie, and, switching to Norman, added, “this is Edyth, and she’s the village midwife. She’ll explain your womanhood to you. You be good, don’t cause trouble, and _don’t_ run off anywhere.” And before Matilde could say anything, she had stomped back toward Lord Jean’s hall.

Edyth beckoned Matilde inside. Matilde looked at her, curious. This old woman was surely no danger to her, but she was a Saxon, all the same, and she was surveying Matilde with a keen eye she was unused to. At the manor, no one _looked_ at Matilde. They ignored her, or shouted for her so she could do something, but she was to be ignored, to be worked hard, to be laughed at or dismissed – never to be looked at. Even here in the village, the children who had once been her playmates wouldn’t meet her eye when she met them in church, or bringing water from the well. She wanted to shrink from the woman’s gaze, she wanted to disappear – but as soon as she found herself thinking that, she stopped herself. _Not again,_ she thought. _You can’t do that again, and not here. Not after the fuss you caused last time that you..._ She shook her head. Best not to think about that too hard either, lest it happened again. So with a deep breath she steeled herself and stepped into the house with a polite greeting.

The old woman’s Norman was near non-existent, but Matilde still had enough of her English from running around with the village children that, falteringly, they were able to make do. The conversation was stop and start, but after some minutes, Edyth explained to Matilde that she was not dying, merely growing up, and gave her a gentle explanation of a woman’s place in the cycle of the moon. She was careful, stopping to make sure Matilde understood, and spoke so soothingly that Matilde found herself almost forgetting she was talking with a stranger, and a Saxon stranger at that. But just as the conversation was drawing to a close, Edyth’s pale blue eyes had fixed the girl with a long, strange look that made Matilde shiver.

“Aren’t you the girl they had to fetch down from the roof?”

“I…” Matilde coloured. “It was an accident.” It was bad enough that the entire household wouldn’t stop talking about this, but apparently the scandal was the only thing in the village that could unite the Norman and Saxon divide, if the old Saxon midwife had heard the story too.

“What an interesting accident,” Edyth replied, and Matilde wondered if that was warmth she detected behind those eyes. “To disappear into thin air from the great hall during dinner, and only be found hours later atop the roof, where even a squirrel could barely reach.”

“Well, I…” Matilde shrugged. What did the old woman want her to say? It felt like everyone in her life had interrogated her about how she’d ended up on that roof, so of course now she was making a new acquaintance, that was all they would be interested in too. She didn’t particularly want to lie, but she couldn’t tell the truth that without sounding like she was lying – better to say nothing at all. “I just wanted to get away from everyone for a minute. And then I got stuck.”

_There_ , she thought. _That wasn’t a lie, not really._ There was no need to tell the _whole_ truth – that she had simply been at table, wishing she were anywhere else than the stinking great hall where the smoke prickled her eyes. And she’d taken a deep breath, thinking of the open sky outside, and blinked – and when her eyes had opened, there she was, alone and sitting on the thatch of the roof.

Edyth placed a hand on her arm, and Matilde flinched – but it wasn’t a hit, or even a rough grab. Instead, the woman was simply touching her, and the feeling of her skin, warm, wrinkled, against Matilde’s was comforting. Matilde breathed out slowly, and realized she felt relaxed with Edyth, even if she was a Saxon, even if her time in this cottage was to teach her about the pain of becoming a woman. “Let me take a guess, girl,” she said. “You don’t know how you got there, do you?”

“Well, I…”

“One moment you were in the hall, and the next you were gone. Like you’d just disappeared.” Matilde nodded, not quite wanting to say it out loud. If she said the impossible thing out loud, it would disappear in a moment. She didn’t even like thinking about it too hard.

“I’m going to take another guess,” Edyth said, and Matilde picked up a carefulness in her tone like she was talking to a spooked horse. “This isn’t the first time you’ve suddenly disappeared when you didn’t think you’d be missed, is it?”

“I…” Matilde took a deep breath and decided to face the impossible head-on. “I normally manage to get back before anyone sees I’m gone.” She’d come to this cottage for the shame of blood on the straw, the shame of coming of age without a mother to guide her into womanhood – she hadn’t imagined she could ever be revealing this shame instead, this secret shame borne of years of carefully hiding. But she felt Edyth’s hand on her arm, and she saw the Saxon woman give her an encouraging half-smile, and she felt at once like telling her had been the right choice.

“I see,” said Edyth, and she let the words hang in the air while a long silence settled. “So,” she said eventually, and Matilde found herself hoping that the hand on her arm would not be taken away, not yet, “They say you are an orphan.”

“I suppose.” Matilde broke eye contact, not wanting to look at Edyth while she talked about this. Instead, she found herself looking at the contents of Edyth’s cottage: the fire, close to dying to embers, with its blackened cooking pot standing above it. The filthy straw strewn across the floor. The racks and racks of herbs hanging in the rafters to dry. “My mother died in Normandy, before…” she tailed off, not knowing how to say ‘before we invaded’, but Edyth seemed to understand, nodding her along. “… a long time ago,” Matilde finished lamely. “I was only very young.”

“And your father?”

Matilde gave a shrug, doing her best to sidestep the shame by saying nothing at all.

“I see.” She could still see Edyth out the corner of her eye, could still feel the warmth of that hand on her arm. Her gnarled fingers closed around Matilde’s bony arm a little tighter, giving her a reassuring squeeze. “Do you know if your mother ever… did anything… special?”

Matilde looked around at her, puzzled. “She was the cook back then. She was a _great_ cook. And sometimes, when I couldn’t sleep, she’d sing to me.”

“No, child, not…” Edyth’s lips were smiling, but Matilde could swear she saw tears pricking at the corner of her eyes. Perhaps she’d imagined them so her own tears would feel less lonely. “Did she ever do anything unexpected, like you?”

Matilde looked at her, uncertain.

Edyth sighed. “Well, perhaps not the mother,” she said, as if to herself. “But even if it’s not from a parent, it wouldn’t be unheard of-“

“What are you talking about?” Matilde jerked the hand away from her arm instinctively.

“Forgive me, child,” Edyth said, and the word ‘child’ had Matilde bristling even more. “I will be more direct. Have you ever thought… do you know the word ‘witch’?”

Matilde thought of Father Giselbert, with his bulging eyes and sour breath, rasping from the pulpit or standing uncomfortably close in the great hall. She had heard enough of witches, more than enough – witches were heathens and consorts of Satan. Witches were destined for the fires of hell. And so it could go on. Of course, the word in Norman was different entirely, and Father Giselbert would not speak in English unless absolutely necessary - but it was from his sermons, all the same, that she had learnt it. Not from anything he said himself, but from the mutterings around the church afterwards, the dark looks that passed between Saxons. King Guillame, they said, kept council with witches, and had used their magic to take the throne. Giselbert could preach all he wanted about the ungodliness of witches, but when Guillame had marched on the rebels in the North, his witches had punished the Northerners by burning their crops in the fields with their unnatural arts. Matilde had heard more than enough about witchcraft, and she looked at Edyth is confusion. “But I’m not a witch. I don’t do magic when I disappear – I don’t do _anything_. It just happens.”

Both Edyth’s hands closed around Matilde’s forearms now: the old woman was looking directly into her eyes, white hair flying astray around her head. “Listen to me,” she said, and there was such a power to the words that Matilde found herself unable to do anything else. “Witchcraft is far more than the fever dreams your cracked Norman priest peddles on a Sunday.”

“But I-“

“You may think you know about witches, about magic, but it is a _lie_.” Some wild, strange emotion was tearing through Edyth now, her face lit by something other than the dying firelight. “Witches do not trifle with demons for their power, girl: a witch is _born_ , gifted with magic, and she learns from those who have come before her. No devils; no heathenry – just the gift of blood and the gift of honest toil. And these gifts, Matilde, are to be yours too.”

“Are you telling me that I’m a witch?” Matilde found herself unmoved at the news somehow. She had been called a litany of names through the years – witch was just one more, and if this old woman was to be believed, it might not be such a bad thing to be.

Before Edyth could answer, the fire that had been dying in the hearth flared, flames reaching out and licking the thatch of the roof. The blazing light softened the edges of Edyth’s face, stripping back the years, making her young, and beautiful, and terrifying. Matilde screamed, springing to her feet, looking for water in the strange cottage. But a moment later, the fire subsided again, and Edyth was smiling at her. “Are you-?” Matilde began, and Edyth answered with a barely perceptible nod.

“I am telling you that I am a witch, and I am telling you that you are a witch.” Edyth looked herself again, gnarled like an old oak, but some aspect of that power still clung to her. Matilde didn’t think she would ever be able to unsee it now. “And I am telling you that you can use your magic for so much more than simply disappearing onto a rooftop.”

Matilde was looking at Edyth, eyes wide. There was so much she needed to know, so much she needed to ask, and all the words were rushing towards her tongue at the same time, so that she had no idea what was going to come out. The words that reached her lips first were simply, “can you teach me?”

“I can,” said Edyth, “and far more than village fair tricks like that. I can teach you to hold your power, to use the healing arts…” and she saw the eagerness in Matilde’s eyes, and smiled. “And perhaps how to make a flame tall, and how to place yourself on a roof on purpose, and a few other entertainments.”

“How did you learn?” Asked Matilde, before adding, crestfallen, “are there books of magic? Would I have to be able to read?” Not even the Lord Jean could read: to Matilde, reading was the sole domain of the priesthood, and the thought of having to spend long hours with Father Giselbert tutoring her, sitting ever so slightly too close, was enough to set her teeth on edge.

“I became an apprentice, much as you would to me,” said Edyth, “and I learned from Wulfrida, who learned from Hereburg, who learned from Alfertha – and so it goes back. There are plenty of books of magic: but those are not of _our_ magic, and you should put them out of your mind. There is magic older than pen and parchment, and we do not need to worry about what the sorcerers of London or Hogwarts may be thinking.”

“The sorcerers of…”

But Edyth waved it away. “No matter. Now, girl, they’ll be wondering where you are at the great house, I expect?” Matilde was less certain. After all, when she’d found herself on the roof, it had been hours until anyone had thought to look for her. “I’ll be sending you back,” the old woman continued, “and you are to tell them that I’ve taken a liking to you, and I’ll be taking you as an apprentice. Don’t use the word witch – I’m sure I don’t need to tell you why – but tell them you’re to train with me as a midwife.”

Matilde swallowed hard. She knew how to survive in the manor. To do what she was told, and to make herself small, and to try to disappear - she was, if anything, a little _too_ good at that last one – and, most importantly, to never ask for anything. She had avoided enough half-hearted blows with a broom, had endured enough snipes from Marie and torments from Anne and Isabeau, to know that the less she could be seen the better. It was better to go to bed hungry than endure the indignities that would come with asking for supper. The thought of going and _telling_ people what had happened, of announcing, of asking, filled her with a terror far deeper than when she had woken this morning and merely thought she was dying. “What if…” she stammered, uncertain how best to put this tide of fear into words, “what if they say no? Would they even allow you to train a… a…”

Edyth looked at her carefully, a slow smile spreading over her face. “A Norman?” She asked, amused. “One of the great conquerors?” Matilde nodded mutely. “My child,” Edyth continued. “I know every woman in this village, Norman and Saxon alike. The men can have their wars, the king can tax us and burn our fields, and them in the big house may have their fancy airs from the old country. But there isn’t a woman here, wherever she’s from, who I haven’t helped with bringing a child into this world, or preventing a child whose time was not right from being born. If not that, then an ointment, a poultice, an infusion of willow bark for pain… and not just the women, either. I know the men, too, the children… if anyone has a worm in their tooth, an ache in their back, they come to Edyth. I brought half the village into this world, and when their days grow short, it’s me who will guide them out of it, me who’ll do the real work before that fat fool in the new church mutters his words. Do you understand?” Matilde shook her head, uncertain exactly what her new mistress – if no one stopped her from accepting, that is – was saying. “People remember, girl. People remember, and people are grateful, and maybe, sometimes, a little afraid of what the cunning woman of the village might know, and what she could say, if she doesn’t get what she wants. There’s a power in what we do much deeper than any magic.” She gave her another smile, a warm one: a flaming brand to light her way back to the manor through the still-hazy dawn. “You remember that.”

* * *

It had taken Matilde nearly a full week to ask anyone about apprenticing with Edyth. When she first slunk back into the great hall, it was to a harried Marie telling her all of the floors would need fresh straw and rushes right away, and she had been anxious enough not to cause any more problems that she’d done her best to disappear entirely. It was only when Sunday loomed on the horizon, and she started to consider the possibility of seeing Edyth in church, that she decided she had to ask and ask now. She couldn’t bear to think of those warm eyes looking at her with disappointment.

She received studied indifference from Marie, who told her she could learn whatever she wished providing she didn’t think it would get her out of her responsibilities at the great house, and a barrage of taunts from the twins that the little bastard girl was going to become a Saxon now, and would end up rolling in the dung with the rest of the English animals.

“Let them say what they want,” Edyth said with a smile when she told her a few days later. “They’re growing older: they’ll be here to see the cunning woman soon enough, for one thing or another. Besides, I hardly think anyone who serves a bastard for a king has the right to mock anyone else’s parentage.” She gave her new protégé a strange, probing look, like she was testing her, but Matilde couldn’t find it in her heart to be scandalized. What did she care about the king? All he’d ever done for her was force her and the rest of Lord Jean’s household to move overseas after the conquest. A day on the ocean that had turned her green and a new land of chilly winds and endless rain was the most she had ever got from Guillame, and there was no love lost between bastards.

She was run ragged in the months after that. Each day, Edyth would have her assisting with a difficult birth, or gathering a rare herb by moonlight, or simmering a poultice over a low fire; and always the two of them would talk of magic and how it was done. She learned much in those months: how to cast out gangrene from a wound, how to bind pain and seal it away, how to bring new life into the world and gently usher out the old. She also learned how to feel her magic running through her, and channel it so that it wouldn’t lash out and disappear her onto a roof, how to strike a fire without flint or tinder, how to see like noon on a night with no moon, and other things that she enjoyed to no end, even if Edyth would refer to them as hedge witch tricks. And then there were other lessons, lessons Matilde had no idea she was learning until long afterwards: how to stand tall and look lords and ladies in the eye. How to let a cruel word glance off you like a sword blow on a shield. How it was good to work hard, and well, with a friend, and share bread together afterwards, and spend a little time by the fire reflecting on the job just done and the work that was yet to come.

But however long she spent with Edyth, whatever work they did together, and however filthy and exhausted she returned to the great house, Marie always had something that needed doing that very moment, something she had been incredibly lax not to have done already. So it seemed to Matilde that she spent much of her days in a barely-conscious haze, scrubbing cooking pots, mucking out the pigs, or scrubbing endless laundry in the river until her knuckles were red raw and her hands shaking from cold. At the end of the day, she’d collapse into a weary sleep the moment her eyes closed, and dream of magic.

Sometimes, Edyth would travel for a few days outside the village. A herb would need buying that would not grow in their soil, and she would bring the choicest bundles of her own to trade at the great market in Nottingham, a full day’s journey away. Or perhaps a midwife a few villages away, barely a few years older than Matilde, would have a mother she knew was delivering twins soon, and she would send for Edyth to supervise the birth and impart long years of wisdom. Matilde was always beyond curious about these other witches Edyth would meet with – who were they? What was it like to meet others, so many others, and share this gift with them? But even when she felt daring enough to try to beg Marie to let her go, the woman would never let her. The great house could not _possibly_ spare her, Marie would say. It was bad enough that Matilde was out at all hours with that Saxon woman, learning God knows what instead of doing honest work… and so it would go on, inevitably ending in Marie inventing another arduous and unpleasant task for Matilde to do afterwards. After the first few trips, she learned to stop asking. After Edyth came back, Matilde would content herself with spending an evening by the old woman’s fire, asking endless questions until the flames died down to embers and Edyth would relight the hearth with a snap of her fingers.

* * *

The second time that Edyth mentioned Hogwarts was during one of these evenings, months later. A crop of toadstools from the woods had been particularly good: when plucked and dried, Edyth had decided that they had more than they could possibly use, even in two years. She had taken a woven bag of them to market, returning with powders from Spain and farther afield that she sniffed at suspiciously, but was keen to learn more of the properties of. Not that there was time for them to get to that tonight; Matilde was full with questions about the witch she had traded with, of witches abroad, of herbs from outside these shores, and Edyth was doing her best to answer as they chatted over the meal they prepared. One of the hens had stopped laying: their immediate plans for the bird were more focused towards filling their bellies than any kind of magical study, but later, Edyth had promised to teach Matilde to divine the future through the bird’s entrails. “I’ll hold it still with a spell – perhaps we’ll be able to practice that soon, I don’t think you’re quite ready yet,” said Edyth, shouting to be heard over the bird’s squawks and placing a heavy cleaver in her hand. “You deal with this. Don’t be afraid to make a mess, there’s no need to be dainty here. We aren’t at Hogwarts.”

“What’s Hogwarts?” Matilde asked vaguely. The cleaver was Edyth’s, and it was a good one: the bird’s head came off with one blow and the cacophony from the chicken immediately stopped.

“Nowhere you need concern yourself about,” came the reply. “A more meddlesome group of witches than you’d find _anywhere_ in Spain or the lands of Rome.”

“But what _is_ it?” Asked Matilde. The word was familiar, somehow – she had heard Edyth mention it before, she was sure of it.

“A convocation of witches so grand, they think you and I do little more than hedge magic,” the old woman spat. Sometimes when Edyth talked of magic, of witchery beyond the two of them, Matilde caught glimpses of some enormous world of schemes and titles that would put all the politics of England, Normandy and the Church of Rome to shame.

“Didn’t you talk about the sorcerers of Hogwarts before, when I first came to you?” asked Matilde. It was coming back to her now. “Something about… magic being written down?”

Edyth sighed. “There are those, my girl, with no respect for magic as a living thing. They would see magic pinned to parchment with a quill and cut open like that poor hen,” she said, pulling feathers out with a practiced hand. “They would write their spells on paper, and study them in Latin, and only channel them through a piece of wood, until the magic is entirely dead and laid in front of them for their study.” She sniffed and began plucking the dead bird’s feathers, yanking each quill out with rather more vehemence than needed.

“And that’s the sort of magic they study at Hogwarts?” Asked Matilde, intrigued despite herself. If Edyth held the place in such contempt, surely no good could come of it, but somehow every detail she heard about this place made her more curious.

“That’s the kind of magic you get when the rich and the powerful decide they have a mind for it, girl.” Edyth was plucking the bird so roughly Matilde was half worried she was going to tear up the skin. “A dead thing, wrapped in words and useless. In Britain, there are two groups of witches I can think of like that. One is in London, and they sit at court and eat from the palm of King Guillame’s hand like so many tamed dogs.” She spat a great wad of phlegm into the filthy rushes on the floor.

“And the other is Hogwarts?”

“The other,” Edyth said, “is indeed Hogwarts. All the way North in Scotland, out from under the thumb of any Norman king, but none the better for it. I’ve heard they fool their muggle lords by playacting as a monastery, with mass five times a day and all the appearances of a place of holy learning, but it’s not scripture they study there, oh no. It’s their magic – useless, wreathed in parchment and bleeding ink.” She held the bird up critically, and it was plucked with a skill Matilde could never reach by hand and would struggle to match by magic. “They take children on as apprentices, novices, teach them their own dead ways of magic, and send them out into the world like the saints evangelizing to us poor heathen sinners.”

“So many witches live there?” Matilde wondered. Witchcraft to her was a private affair, something between her and Edyth – it was easy to forget there were any other witches in the entire world. The thought of many witches, living together, learning and practicing magic, hiding from the Lord Jeans of the world in plain sight, was as disquieting as it was thrilling.

“If you can _call_ them witches,” spat Edyth. “Bunch of overgrown lordlings and spoilt monks. No one at that school has known a hard day’s work in their life, and you can count on it,” she said. _A whole school of magic?_ Thought Matilde, but thinking that felt like treachery when Edyth was pouring so much of herself into teaching her. She shook the thought away, rummaging for the knife at her belt when her teacher gestured for it. “Now,” she said, “if you are to make a cut here, we can begin to consider the future…”

Matilde cut through the skin, the bird’s entrails spilling out before her, and considered the future. She was not in a grand community of witches like Hogwarts, but there was community enough for her here. She had few friends at the manor, but that was nothing new. She had Edyth, and she had the gift of her magic. For the first time in many years now, the future held promise.


	4. Gifts Given, Pain Felt

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Content warning: this chapter contains a brief, non-graphic scene of attempted sexual assault.

**1074 Anno Domine**

It was a year since Matilde had begun to learn witchcraft. Edyth had guided her through the full cycle of the seasons, the waxing and waning of magic through the year and the plants she could find in each month. Since the first night she began bleeding, her own body had begun to settle into its own cycle as well, but that was still unpredictable. The last ice was melting on the streams and the snowdrops were beginning to crack open in the meadows: spring had come with a regularity that Edyth assured Matilde her womb would take many years to reach, if it did at all.

It was long past midnight, but Matilde had not slept. Down in the village, Winfrith’s child had tried to leave the womb backwards. Edyth had sent a runner to the manor for Matilde shortly after dinner, and she had hurried down to the mother’s house, where Edyth was already using all the skill she had to save both Winfreth and the baby. Winfreth was young to be a mother, only a few years older than Matilde. Back when Matilde had run with the mob of Saxon children through the village, Winfreth had been there, too: in the years afterwards, she’d kept a chilly distance from Matilde. But she needed her now. Sometimes as she joined Edyth on her rounds of the village, she’d meet with her former Saxon playmates. They were not chatty, per se, but they would meet her eye now. Edyth was right – being the witch of the village carried a certain power, and being a witch’s apprentice seemed to let a little of it reflect on her. Any enmity was forgotten in the hut right now: there was merely one frantic life trying to begin, the three women trying to bring it into the world, and a worried husband who seemed determined to get under everyone’s feet.

Edyth was lost in a trance, trying to persuade the terrified child by magic to turn around and lost to the outside world. Matilde knew some of the theory of this, but there was no way Edyth would let her try it just yet, and especially not with a case as delicate as this. Perhaps in a few months when it came to lambing, she might have the chance to try then. For now, Matilde had been tasked with watching and learning as much as she could, with slowing Winfrith’s breathing, by magical means and otherwise, with calming her frantic husband, and most crucially lifting the pain from the poor woman’s body and placing it elsewhere. She hated having to bind pain. Forcing it from its host came easily, but while Edyth could simply dissipate the disembodied pain and destroy it, this was still beyond Matilde’s skill. Uncontrolled, it would spiral into all sorts of unexpected places – the fire would flare, she would see Edyth’s concentration wane as it flowed into her, or wince as fragments of it shot through her body, or, once, she heard the screaming of a goat outside and knew she had directed it out of the hut entirely. Since she couldn’t destroy the pain, she had to work out where it would be best channelled. Moving it into the goat seemed cruel, and, despite the occasional temptation, she could not reasonably channel it to the useless husband. But outside the window of the house was a crab-apple sapling, unwanted and worried by the goat. As long as it was in view, Matilde would be able to pour the pain from Winfreth into the tree, and if the apples were especially sour this year, that would be a small price to pay for the safe delivery of a child.

Hours passed, hours of excruciating toil. The sun began to show itself over the horizon, and the world was growing bleary and out of focus as Matilde fought to keep the pain from Winfreth. But eventually, by the combined efforts of all four, mother, child, witch and apprentice, a daughter was born.

“What will you name her?” Edyth asked, her hair lank with sweat and hanging either side of her face as the father cut the cord.

“Can’t rightly say,” the man grunted. “It’s long enough until Father Giselbert will baptise her, and Win never could make up her mind, so-“

“She’s called Godgyfu,” panted his wife, “because she’s a gift from the Lord, and I won’t hear a word about it.”

Little Godgyfu was busy screaming her eyes out, but Edyth smiled at the child. “Welcome, Godgyfu,” she said solemnly, before handing the baby to her mother. Matilde privately reflected that if the child was indeed a gift from God, perhaps God could do his best to make His gifts easier to receive.

The rest of Matilde’s time in Winfreth’s house passed in a strange smear, both slowly and with every moment overlapping at once. Edyth gave instructions about feeding, about sleeping, with such sternness that even the useless lump of a husband would surely pay some attention, but Matilde had heard the speech before and found herself swimming in and out of consciousness, half asleep as she stood. Winfrith thanked them, tears in her eyes and seeming near exhaustion. The husband tried to press silver into Edyth’s hand, which she turned down as gently as she could, just as she always did. Matilde thought she should have taken it for both of their trouble: she felt as though she’d hardly slept for a week. Despite her best efforts, the husband’s anxious fretting had distracted her so much that much of Winfreth’s pain had run through her instead. She and Edyth needed few words to say goodbye to each other: it was not their first difficult birth and would not be the last, and there was little they had to say now that could not be said after a good long rest.

The sun was creeping ever higher in the sky and the first rush of the dawn chorus in the trees around Matilde was beginning to fade already as she walked home. She knew that by the time she arrived back at the big house, she would be expected to be up and working. So as she began to climb the steps to the door, she used her last vestiges of strength to make herself soft and unnoticeable by magic. She would not be totally invisible, that was far beyond her, but unless someone was looking for her, the edges of her grey cloak might seem to fuse with the stone, and she would become profoundly uninteresting and hard to think about. Perhaps if she found a quiet corner, she could catch a few hours of sleep while the charm held. They’d surely think she was still with Edyth, helping deliver the baby.

The door to the manor was open, and Matilde was about to slip through it when she heard the approaching sound of male voices. Lord Jean was coming her way, locked in conversation with Father Giselbert. She panicked – the spell she had cast meant that they likely wouldn’t be able to see her, but it did nothing to stop her standing directly in the way of the two men. She could picture it now, the two of them crashing into her, falling down the stairs, and it appearing that she’d appeared from thin air. _Best to avoid the questions that would bring_ , she thought, and dived to one side over the steps.

It was a short fall, only about five feet, but she landed awkwardly and felt her ankle twist and roll under her as she hit the ground. Cursing under her breath and unsure if the magic she had cast had survived the panic and the fall, she pressed herself back into the corner as she listened to the two men leave the manor.

“-Father, forgive me. I know that the law of the church is your matter, not mine, but I cannot help feel that this is all most irregular-“ Lord Jean boomed. Matilde had been spending so much time with Edyth these past few months, had helped so many of the people in the village, that Norman was starting to feel alien to her ears, and she marvelled in the strangeness – her own mother tongue was becoming as different to her as English had when she’d first come to this strange land.

“No, of course,” Father Giselbert wheezed. “But if we may, perhaps, be frank?” Matilde’s attention drifted, because her ankle was really hurting now, the dull, throbbing ache growing more and more distracting. She sighed. If she were less tired, she would try to bind the pain, to destroy it or to cast it somewhere else – but after the night she had had, she couldn’t be sure where the pain would go. There was every chance she would take the pain and place it into one of the two men, or someone else – there were just too many people around. She gritted her teeth, determined not to let it overcome her –perhaps she would hobble back to Edyth and see if there was a poultice they could make or some charm they could use.

The two men were nearly gone by now, heading down the path toward the stream and the old wooden church, where Giselbert continued to hold mass until the masons had finished laying the heavy stones of the new church closer to the North road. “Well,” she heard Lord Jean say, “I suppose there can be no real objection…” At this point, she was unsure if the spell she had cast on herself had held, but judging that she was in no danger of being seen by the two men she picked herself up. Inside, her luck seemed to have turned for the better – there was no sign of Marie. Scarcely thinking, she made her way to a quiet corner and despite the pain in her ankle, passed out almost at once.

*******

Rough hands shook Matilde awake and she surfaced slowly, groggily. Marie’s face loomed huge over hers.

“Up. Up, girl! God knows Lady Heloise has spent half the morning looking for you.”

“Please, a few more minutes,” Matilde said heavily. “I was up all night delivering Winfrith’s child, I-“

“No time for your excuses,” Marie said, motioning her up. Matilde stood slowly, testing her ankle – the moment she put weight on it a jolt of pain shot through her whole leg and she winced. “No point sending you to her ladyship now, there’s no time,” Marie continued without a moment’s hesitation. “You may as well go straight there.”

“Straight where?” Matilde asked, her head still fuzzy with the sleep she’d barely woken from.

“Father Giselbert wants to see you. He’ll be in the old church, and don’t you keep him waiting.”

She was as awake as if Marie had thrown a pail of icy water on her. What on earth could Father Giselbert want with her? A sudden frightening thought lodged itself in Matilde’s brain and wouldn’t leave: _he knows that I’m a witch_. What if he knew it all, about her, about Edyth, and was ready to have them denounced as heretics? What if-

“And good God, girl, your hair looks like a rat’s nest! _Do_ something with it, you can’t see the father like that!” Marie looked her up and down, sighed, and left. _Am I supposed to hurry to the church without delay,_ Matilde thought, still heavy with sleep, _or am I supposed to do something with my hair and make myself look presentable?_ She ran her hands idly through her hair. It was a tangle, alright, stiff with fire-smoke, grime and unknowable filth. She wondered idly when she’d last washed it, and decided there was no point trying to do anything now. It was no use making any real attempt to tame her hair at the best of times, and if she were going to be drowned for heresy and witchcraft, what did it matter, really, how her hair looked? She shook her head, trying to dislodge the mania that exhaustion had lodged into it.

She hoped that her ankle was only sprained, but as she limped through the manor, was beginning to fear the worst. By the time she was climbing down the steps she’d taken the fall from, she knew that tiredness be damned, she _had_ to try something. She paused for a moment, leaning on the rough bark of an oak, and screwed her eyes shut. She gave herself a moment to feel the pain and feel it in full. It was bad, and no matter how much she tried not to put weight on that leg, every step was going to make it worse. But she was able to grasp it, to hold the discomfort in front of her in her mind and push out, and as the pain flowed out of her body she let out a long sigh of relief. But the pain was still _there_ , still bubbling in front of her, and she was too tired by far to attempt to destroy it entirely. No, she would need to find a host for it, and soon, before it snapped back into her. This was the difficult part: if she just had to stay here, she could pour it into the oak tree. There were years enough in that wood to bear one foolish girl’s pain. But she wasn’t staying here, she was moving through the village, and it would be minutes before she could reach the church. If she didn’t bind the pain, every step would be agony; if she did, she would be casting it into something new constantly as she moved. It would be easier than destroying it, but not by much.

And was she even sure the church was where she should go? Whatever he wanted, even though it may not be as dramatic as putting her to death, she wanted nothing to do with Giselbert. The priest had unnerved her long before she had to worry about being a consort of Satan in his eyes. What she _wanted_ to do was go to Edyth. The old woman was doubtless asleep, but if pleaded with might be amiable enough to treat her ankle so she’d have no pain to bind. But to reach Edyth’s cottage, she would pass Father Giselbert and his church anyway, and if he saw her… she swore an oath under her breath, a cruder, nonmagical way to manage the pain that was nonetheless effective for a moment. _The oak tree will be a good place for it for twenty paces_ , she thought, as she began to limp carefully towards the old church. _And after that, the old rowan. One tree at a time._

The short journey to the old church left her out of breath and panting on the step outside. The door was open: she knew she should enter, but lingered a moment, regaining her breath. She could not see in; the spring sunlight was so bright that the open doorway may as well have been a crypt. She steeled herself, took a deep breath, and stepped in, her eyes straining to even find the weak points of candlelight in the church. Was Giselbert even here? If not, perhaps she could lean on the wall to rest for a minute, then go and find Edyth. Perhaps-

“So, Lord Jean sent you?”

Giselbert was there. She might almost have thought he had done her concealment charm on himself, his black robes hid him so well in the long shadow of the church. Squinting, Matilde did her best to read his face. Was it filled with the righteous zeal of denouncing the heathen and the sinner? Was she in danger? But there was no mob of villagers with him, and the man seemed calm enough. But there was something about him, some nervous energy, that would not let her relax. She frowned, leaning a little of her weight against the door to try to spare her ankle.

“I don’t know, Father.” She said, gritting her teeth. “I was told to come here by Marie. She said that Lady Heloise wanted me to see you?”

“More or less, my child. In fact, I spoke with Lord Jean, and he spoke with Lady Heloise, and she spoke with Marie, who summoned you. It is no matter; the Lord has many messengers.” The priest was standing half in the light from the door, half in shadow. He was smiling, and it set her teeth on edge more than even the effort of holding the pain at bay did. She leant on the door, the solid wood of the church a welcome support. If only she could channel her pain into these planks of strong oak, throw her suffering into four strong walls to bounce around the rafters. But this church was older by far than even Edyth, old enough that Lord Jean was building a new church of fresh-cut stone and careful arches. This wood was long dead, and she might as well try to bind her pain into it as into a stone. There was nowhere for it to go. She took a moment’s pause to gather her strength, letting the pain flood through her, just for a moment, before she could cast it out again. “What is important,” said Father Giselbert, “is that I have called for you, and you are here, even if your appearance is a little… unkempt.”

“I’m sorry, Father,” she said faintly, her eyes unfocusing. “I was out delivering the new baby tonight, Winfreth’s baby.” _Best to be polite,_ she thought. “Her name is Godgyfu. Have you called upon her yet?” With great effort, she gathered the pain, twisted it together, and pushed it away from her leg. She had no other option; she would just have to hold it in front of her, and when the effort began to be too much, the pain would have to flood back into her body. Just for a moment. Just until she could regather her strength….

“Of course,” he said, “A blessing from God... how very apt, would you not say? I will be sure to visit her presently.” A silence hung between them. What was Matilde supposed to say? Why, she asked herself, had he summoned her here? Surely not for this. “It is a great thing to help a new life into this world. A gift from God indeed,” said Father Giselbert, with a great rasping intake of breath. “I have known you since you were just a child, Matilde,” he said, looking her up and down. There was something in his eyes she didn’t like, something that had her gripping the doorframe until her knuckles turned white. “Since before your mother died.”

 _Don’t talk to me about my mother_ , Matilde thought. Something about the man made her bristle. _I bet you don’t even remember her name._ But all she said was “Yes, sir. What-“

“It is excellent to see you now, so many years later, bringing a child into this world,” Giselbert interrupted her, uninterested in her question. “Perhaps soon, you will be bearing a child of your own.”

“I… I am still only young,” Matilde said. The pain was a red-hot ball now, floating in front of her. She thought of moving it over the font. Would the water boil, just from being next to it? “I cannot say I have yet thought of marriage-”

“Marriage, yes,” the father said. Matilde’s pain and the effort of keeping it at bay was nearly forgotten now – her body was pressing into the wood of the doorframe with the urge to keep herself as far away as possible from Giselbert. “I suppose it is natural a young girl thinks of marriage, is it not?”

“Well, I -“

“It is natural for anyone to long for marriage.” It was obvious by now that anything Matilde said fell on deaf ears, and there was a fervour in his eyes. Not quite the zeal of his preaching against sin and heresy, something different – something animated, something eager. “For God did not make only Adam, did he?” Continued Giselbert, and his tone had taken on something of the pulpit to it. But the pulpit stood empty, at the back of the church, and Giselbert was standing near to her, shifting slowly nearer – the font was all that really stood between them now. “Adam asked the Lord for a helpmeet, and the Lord provided.”

 _What is he talking about?_ Wondered Matilde, and it was no good, it was too hard to hold onto the pain. This must easily be twice as long as she’d ever held it outside herself before, and she could feel it faltering, could feel herself beginning to lose her grip on it. With a wince, she released – and the pain sprang back into her with a vengeance. Even leaning against the door, even with no weight on her leg, an angry throb jangled along the nerves all the way up to her hip. _Just a few moments. Just a few moments and you can cast it out again…_

“But there are some,” the priest continued, “who would not say the same. No, there are some who think we should be as the Apostle Paul was, that it is good to abide as he did, solitary and celibate. Who would say it is a sin for a priest to take a wife. Well, who are they to argue with the Lord?” Spittle was flying from his mouth now, his stinking breath was rolling over her, and Matilde was scared. Giselbert had always been ridiculous, unpleasant, someone to avoid when she could, but he’d never been frightening before. “I will be Adam!” He continued, and she focused on casting the pain back out. “I will be Adam, not Paul! I will have my woman. And,” he said, his smile chilling Matilde, “I have spoken to my Lord, and my Lord has provided.”

There was a moment’s hideous silence, and the pieces began to fall into place for Matilde. The moment’s conversation she had overheard with Lord Jean. The summons. All of this. “You…” she gritted her teeth, feeling the pain flow back out of her body and holding it between them like a barrier, “you would… you would marry me?”

Giselbert gave no answer but took a step closer to her, a smile widening.

“But you can’t! I’m not-“

“Can’t?” A shadow passed across Giselbert’s face. “Oh, you would talk to me of what I can and cannot do? It’s not as if you have a father to consult, Matilde – I have spoken to Lord Jean, and I have told him that I must have a wife. He has consulted with Lady Heloise, and she has said that you can easily be spared, and so his lordship sent me you. Perhaps a little more dishevelled than I would like, but it is no matter.”

“I… I won’t marry you.” Shaking, Matilde threw the pain out of her body. She needed her leg to be strong under her, she needed to run, to get out of here; but where would she go? “I won’t! You can’t just _buy_ me from Lord Jean, I’m not-“

“Buy you?” Matilde felt as though she’d left her body entirely, and was somewhere up above in the cavernous roof, watching Giselbert spit the words at her. From miles away, she watched him step closer to her, past the font. She could see the ball of pain from here, a struggling, red, angry thing, and it was hovering, the only thing between them. “Why would I have to buy you? You aren’t a courtesan, or a concubine, Matilde. You’re not Mary Magdalen. No one _buys_ an unwashed bastard serving girl.” He took another step forward as Matilde watched frozen from the rafters. “Lord Jean _gave_ you to me. For both of us, in truth. He has one less hungry mouth to feed, and I… I will have the helpmeet I desire. I will have my Eve.”

He stepped forward, through the pain. For a moment, he winced horribly, and Matilde watched the pain flow back into her body rather than go to him unbidden. The pain passed from him, and he and laid a hand on Matilde’s shoulder. She was glad she was here, safe, far away from her own body, and didn’t have to feel the touch of his clammy hand as he ran it through her hair, didn’t have to inhale the reek of his breath, didn’t have to feel the pain of her leg flow back into her. Here, she was safe, and just had to watch. Just watch.

“And Adam and Eve,” Father Giselbert said, “were naked in the garden. And it was good.” And his fingers ran down through her hair and began to play at the collar of her smock, sliding under it and touching her bare skin – and at that, suddenly, Matilde was not safe anymore. She was not up above, looking down numbly – she was looking out of her own eyes. She was leaning on a leg that was near-giving way with pain, and Father Giselbert was touching her, his fingers moving against her skin, standing so close she could feel the warmth of his body through his robes – and Matilde screamed. She screamed and the pain left her body, and Giselbert’s fingers stopped their movement for a moment, his eyes frozen in surprise. The pain was pouring out of her now, wild, and she tried to grasp it as it left, tried to shape it so that she could bind it – but it slipped through her fingers like sand. She watched, screaming, as the pain poured out of her, as the crackling, angry mass of it surged to the only other living thing in the church.

It was not Giselbert’s ankle that had been twisted. The priest knew nothing of the casting out and binding of pain, knew nothing of what was coming – and when Matilde’s suffering slammed into him he cried out in surprise, stumbling back. Matilde unfroze quickly: this was her chance, she could break away from the man, make a run for it, leg be damned. But his hand was still below her neckline, and as Matilde struggled to move, as Giselbert jerked backwards, it tangled up in her clothes. He tried to pull himself free, struggling, and Matilde realized that she had stopped screaming now, but he was letting out a scream of surprise, of anger and hurt as all the pain in her body continued to flow into him. He managed to pull his arm free with one wild gesture, but it was too much for him – he tottered as he broke free, ready to lunge back toward Matilde again, and lost his balance entirely.

Giselbert fell backwards, still screaming, until his head met the hard edge of the font. The screaming stopped, and he crumpled to the floor.

Between each flagstone of the church floor was a little groove, and Matilde watched numbly as the blood began to flow and fill each tiny channel. A huge red stain dripped slowly on the edge of the font where the priest’s head had struck it on his way down, and where he had met the floor, it poured freely, his skull an ugly mess. Barely thinking anything, Matilde did as she had been trained: she checked for the rise and fall of his chest. Nothing. She should check for a his heartbeat next, she knew, but she could not help but feel reluctant. Taking a long, shuddering deep breath, she muttered a spell to cut his robes, leaving his chest exposed. Matilde was sure she had felt enough of the touch of Giselbert’s skin for one day, for a lifetime; she checked placed a hand over his heart, and there was nothing. Giselbert lay, flat upon the floor, eyes wide open in shock, and stone dead. _I won’t mourn for him_ , she thought. _Not now, and not ever_.

She realised with a shudder that her leg was free of pain – she was still letting all of her pain flow into the corpse. She moved to let the pain back into her own body, but second guessed it. _What more harm can I do him_ , she thought. _And besides, it’s no more than he deserves._

Giselbert was dead. The enormity of what had happened, the reality of what she had done, began to flow into her. She had killed a man – killed a priest, no less – with witchcraft. It had been an accident. But who would believe her? She was the last person to see him, and now he lay, his head a mess of blood and bone. Lord Jean would surely put her to death for this. _And I would rather die_ , she thought, _than have been Giselbert’s wife_. There was only one person in the village she could count upon as her ally, only one person whose counsel she needed now. She needed to speak to Edyth.


	5. It Began and Ended in Blood

“He’s in here?” Edyth shuffled to the church door, pushing it open. “Dear God, girl, everything you said and you didn’t even shut the door? What if someone had come in and found him like this?”

“I-I’m sorry,” said Matilde, following behind her. “I didn’t think.”

“Clearly.” Edyth went through the door, her boots dragging through the congealing pool of blood on the floor. “What a mess.” She sighed deeply. “Let’s see what we can do.”

Once she was awake, the old woman had made short work of Matilde’s ankle. “Not even a break, she grunted, “just a sprain, a bad one.” Within a few minutes, she’d managed to heal it entirely while listening to Matilde’s frantic description of everything that had happened in the old church. Matilde slipped into the church after Edyth, marvelling at the simple ease of taking one step after another without pain.

Edyth was crouched over the body, examining the wound, lost in thought. Matilde did her best to look anywhere other than at Giselbert, but his staring eyes seemed to follow her. She shuddered.

“We can get rid of this.” Edyth broke her silence. “That part’s easy. Change the body so they’ll never find it.” She spat on him. “Maybe a bone that we can throw to the dogs.” She gave Matilde a satisfied smile that the girl couldn’t bring herself to return. “A quick charm should be able to get the blood from the floor and the font,” she said, “and no one need ever know what happened here.” But the spells remained undone and Giselbert’s ruined face was still staring at Matilde. She shivered.

“What… what about when people come looking for him?” asked Matilde, and she realised that panic was starting to rise in her voice. After he had died, she had had one focus: find Edyth. But now Edyth was here, now they were looking down on the body together, she was beginning to realise that this might be beyond even Edyth’s help. “If he’s just gone, Edyth, they’ll think that I-“

“I know.” Edyth sighed. “If he’s gone, and you’re the last person he saw, if he asked Lord Jean to take you as a wife? Even his lordship will be able to piece that together.” Matilde nodded absently. “But…” Edyth was pacing, thinking aloud, “if you are gone, too? Well, that is another matter entirely.”

“What do you mean?”

“Imagine, for a moment, that you are Lord Jean.” Matilde dutifully imagined, standing a little straighter, and wondered what it felt like to have that sort of power over the village and everyone within it. “Well,” Edyth continued, “Your priest has been acting most eccentrically. He has _insisted_ , against all canon law, in taking a wife, and insisted on it being one of your serving girls.” Matilde shuddered. She wished more than anything that she could forget all the events of this morning, could never have to think about them again. Just the thought of Giselbert going to Lord Jean and stating his case made her skin crawl. “As Lord Jean, you agree,” Edyth said, “because you are a coward, and a fool. And the next morning, the priest and the serving girl both… disappear. What would you think?”

Matilde understood. “Not… not that she had killed him, not if there was no body…”

“Exactly!” Edyth cried in triumph, and the words echoed in the empty church. “You only know that they have left. Perhaps this was always his plan, perhaps he has taken a wife and gone to live elsewhere, where the church will not know him… and then, a few years pass. And maybe, if she would like to, this wife returns.” She looked at Matilde, a certain softness in her gaze. “Perhaps you would not want to. Perhaps you might find a life elsewhere that would suit you better. But you will always be welcome here, I promise.”

“But then Giselbert…”

“Dead,” said Edyth dispassionately. _He certainly is,_ thought Matilde, _that’s how we got into this mess to begin with._ “It’s so tragic that he caught a fever and died. You are but a poor young widow, you come back here to train with your old mistress, and so it goes on.” She looked distastefully at Giselbert lying on the floor and sighed. “It’s the only way through I can see.”

Matilde knew immediately she had been right to bring Edyth. This was it – a way through this, however difficult it might be, a way for things to go back to normal. Better, even – as a widow returning to town there would be no need for her to live in the big house, no call for her to serve Marie and Lady Heloise as anything other than their midwife and village cunning woman. But there was one part of this plan to make Matilde pause. She had no great love for her home, but since Lord Jean had brought them here after the conquest, it was all she’d known. “But… if I leave, I… Where else could I go?” she asked, her voice suddenly small under the high ceiling of the church. “I have no family, no one who would take me in…” And suddenly, the weight of all that had happened, the enormity of the entire morning, came crashing down on Matilde’s shoulders, and she began to sob. 

“Hush, child.” Edyth’s tone was soothing, and the older woman wrapped an arm around Matilde shoulder blades. After a moment she began to feel calmer. Perhaps Edyth cast some spell on her – or perhaps it was just her warm touch, her quiet words. It had been a long time since she had been held like this. “We’ll find somewhere for you. Somewhere safe. Far from here, if you like.”

“But…” Matilde’s tears were still flowing, and she closed her eyes – anything to not have to look at the body before her, his vacant face, the blood. “How will I continue to learn? How can I learn _any_ new magic without you?” The words came out her mouth before she knew it, and she realised just what it was she was mourning: not a village of unfriendly faces left behind her, and _certainly_ not the man who lay dead in front of them. No, she was mourning the picking of herbs by moonlight. She mourned understanding a new spell and the smile Edyth would give her when she was able to cast it. She even mourned working through the night to deliver a child, the bone-weary tiredness but the look the two of them would share, of accomplishment, of pride in new life and a job well done. She mourned the learning of new magic, and, most of all, she mourned her friendship with Edyth. It was all very well of Edyth to talk of a ‘few years’ she would be gone from all of this, but Edyth was rich in years and Matilde near-penniless. Matilde had only had magic for one year – how could she go without it for years at a time now?

Edyth sighed heavily. “I don’t know. I know few enough witches, and of those I cannot ask any to take on an apprentice. Particularly not one with trouble at her back. No, I was thinking that perhaps we find a nunnery – a poor girl showing up there, her parents dead… Perhaps with a few gentle charms of persuasion, they could be persuaded to take you in…”

“But how would I _leave?”_ Asked Matilde. A nunnery might be a safe refuge, but she would hardly be free to come and go as she chose. Matilde considered a life within the cloistered walls of a nunnery for a moment, pictured swapping magic for masses, weeks spent in silent prayer, and she shivered.

“I’d thought that-“ Edyth began, but Matilde wasn’t listening, because suddenly, she had it. She understood exactly where she should go, and it felt as if a shock had run through her as she realised: somewhere she could go, she could learn magic, and then come back. “Edyth, I… what if I were to go to Hogwarts?”

“To Hogwarts?”

“You said yourself that it’s half a monastery there!” The words came out of Matilde in an excited rush, tripping over themselves in their ease to escape. “I could go there, learn magic for a few years and then come back here… I know it’s not the same, I know I won’t be taught the _right_ ways, but it has to be better than nothing! Although… Scotland is a long journey. And I do not know the way…”

Edyth looked at her for a long moment and considered. “Perhaps I can help there.”

“You’ve _been_?” Matilde looked at her in shock. How had Edyth never mentioned this?

“Me?” said Edyth, with a small smile. “Never. I cannot. But I do know how you could travel there.”

It all felt tantalisingly possible, so close to being real, and Matilde was almost worried to examine her plan too closely, to touch it, in case it shimmered and disappeared like a weak spell. “How?” She asked, her voice half a whisper, and in her excitement she seized Edyth’s hands in hers.

“Years ago,” Edyth began, “before your time, back when you were still in Normandy, one of the huskarls-“

“Huskarls?” Asked Matilde. Her English was good by now, probably the best of all the Normans in the village, but there were still times that a word would catch her unaware.

“One of the king’s guard, the old king.” Something in Edyth’s eyes went soft, Matilde had noticed, whenever she talked about the past and the times before the Normans came. “This huskarl – his name was Godric - would ride up and down the length of England, and he’d stop everywhere he could. Not just with the cityfolk, or with grand lords and ladies, but every little village he found along the way. There were many who thought it was some scheme of King Edward’s for levying a new tax, or mustering men at arms to fight the Vikings, but _we_ knew. Because in every high castle, in every grand city or small village, Godric would tell his lordly host that, well, he had ridden through the night, but he had a tooth that needed pulling, or perhaps a pain in his belly. Would there be someone in the village, some healer, some wise woman, who they could send him to who might be able to help him?”

Matilde thought she was beginning to understand the shape of the story. “So he came here?”

“Not quite. But Hereward-“ Matilde recognized the name of a man Edyth sometimes bought rare herbs from at market in Nottingham – “tended one of his imaginary pains, a long time ago, and he told me.” Edyth placed a hand on Matilde’s shoulder, and she leant into it, warm and reassuring. “Godric would find the witch in the village, and he’d ask if they had an apprentice. If there were children in the village who had the gift. And then he’d tell them of Hogwarts.” Edyth gave her a rueful smile. “He did his best to prise away our apprentices and take them north. I always swore I’d never give him one. And yet…”

“It’s just until I can come back,” said Matilde hurriedly. And it _was_ , she told herself. She was going because she needed somewhere to escape for a few years, because she could keep learning magic there. She did the best to shut out the treacherous voice in her head that had _always_ been drawn to Hogwarts, as soon as Edyth mentioned it, and that thought it was maybe no bad thing that she might get to go there… “So if this was years ago,” said Matilde, speaking to fill the void that inner voice was filling, “What happened to this Godric? Would he still take me to Hogwarts?”

Edyth shook her head. “Gone,” she said. “Godric was close with King Edward, closer still with Harold. When King Guillame took the throne, started crushing all signs of rebellion… as I heard it, Godric hasn’t set foot in England since.”

“But if he’s not there to take me,” said Matilde, “how am I to get there?” Scotland was far, impossibly far: since coming to England, Matilde had barely left the village and its surrounding woods. The whole plan suddenly felt like a fool’s errand, like the daydream of a scared, stupid little girl. She let the old woman’s gnarled hands fall from her: she was suddenly all too aware of the man on the floor, of how his hands had felt on her skin, and she did not want to be touched at all.

“It’s not just to find witches that Godric was riding the country, girl,” said Edyth. She reached out to touch Matilde reassuringly, and Matilde shrank back. “It’s helping them find him.”

“What do you mean?” Asked Matilde, doing her best to keep her eyes on Edyth and not the body at their feet.

“I mean that I can send you to Nottingham to meet with Hereward. And when Godric met Hereward, he told him of a witch he met outside Lincoln, so Hereward can send you there. And from Lincoln…”

Matilde nodded, catching on. “All the way to Hogwarts. But I’d be travelling alone from town to town?”

“Perhaps. Perhaps you’ll find other witches to travel with.” Edyth sighed. “But you’re quite right – the North is no place for a girl travelling alone.” She eyed Matilde critically, and Matilde shrank back. Giselbert’s eyes had been assessing her like that, just before… she shook it off. Edyth was _helping_ her. “Unless…” Edyth said thoughtfully.

“Unless?”

Edyth stepped around her, pacing a small circle. “Maybe if he was young,” she muttered, more to herself than Matilde. “a young boy, travelling alone, before his first beard grew in…”

“What do you-“ began Matilde, and then realisation dawned. “ _Oh_.”

“No place for a girl,” said Edyth. “But perhaps a boy, too young to be any use with a sword…”

“I don’t know how to be a boy,” Matilde protested. “I don’t have boy’s clothes, I don’t _look_ like a boy-“

“Act like you own the place,” said Edyth wryly. “Or perhaps not. You’ll need to be young, too young for your voice to have dropped, so maybe being timid would make sense. But looking like a boy is simple. You’re light enough on your bones we don’t need to worry about your body looking like a woman’s, so if we just cut your hair back a little, we’ll make sure no one thinks of a girl when they see you...”

An objection rose in Matilde’s throat, and then she remembered when her spirit had left her body and she’d had to watch Giselbert’s hands running through her hair. She remembered falling back into her body as his hands moved through her hair and down to her skin, and she nodded, stifling a shudder. “Cut it,” she said, and found herself looking at the man dead at her feet. “Cut it all for all I care.”

Edyth raised an eyebrow, but reached for the knife at her belt. She waved her hand, and the knife began to flit around Matilde at an impossible speed, shearing through the thick mats of her hair. She felt clumps fall and hit her back and swallowed hard, hoping she wouldn’t come to regret it. “As for clothes,” she said, “my son’s will do nicely.”

“Your… your son’s?” Matilde stared at her. In a morning where it seemed like nothing would be able to surprise her anymore, this had. She and Edyth had had a year of working together, a year of breaking bread, healing the sick, and tending the dying, and Edyth had never mentioned any children at all. “You never said you had a son,” she said quietly.

“That’s a story for another time,” said Edyth gruffly, and the knife flew back to her belt, slipping into its horn sheath with a little snap that seemed to end all further discussion. “That will do nicely.” Matilde felt at her hair, marvelling at the texture of it shorn so close to her scalp and at the draught chilling her head. She hadn’t known her head could get cold until now. “Before we leave to get the clothes,” said Edyth, clearly determined to move on, “we should see to this mess.”

There was no more putting it off: Matilde looked down at Giselbert’s body. She winced at his ruined head, but felt almost a sense of relief seeing him there in this state. He was dead, and she had killed him. Were he alive, he would say that that was a sinful thought and that the jaws of hell were open wide for her. But he wasn’t. What did it matter what he would have said, what he would have done? He was gone, and he would never be able to touch her again.

Edyth kneeled, slowly, joints locking together with the uncooperativeness of years. Edyth watched her brow furrow for just a moment before her face became calm. _She’s taken the pain and banished it_ , the girl thought, and she looked on in envy. If she had that skill as easily, she wouldn’t be in this mess to begin with. No, she’d just be- she shuddered, doing her best to pluck that thought out at the root before it could continue to grow. Edyth had both hands on the body now, and she was muttering something, an incantation Matilde didn’t recognise. It seemed fitting, somehow, as the last words said over Giselbert. No incomprehensible latin, nothing of the church: witchcraft, and English. Everything he had hated. She strained to hear the words at the edge of her hearing, trying to cast her mind back and to recognize their shape, but before she could recall exactly where they came from, there was a bright flash of light.

Matilde cried out, raising her hands, but by the time she was able to cover her eyes, the light was gone. The church was comfortably dim again, the shadows stretching back out to their natural homes: but where Giselbert had lain was nothing at all, only the wine-dark stain of his blood, spreading slowly across the floor, splattered over the font and discolouring the water.

But maybe not quite nothing. Matilde stepped closer, unable to resist the curiosity, and realised that her eyes were still healing from the lightning-flash of Edyth’s magic. There was something lying in the blood; a small set of bones. They didn’t look human, they were too small and too finely formed – they looked as though they could be a bird’s, perhaps a chicken’s. Matilde bent down and inspected the bones, and as she picked them up saw that they were polished and clean to the touch. Each had a rune carved into them.

“Divining bones?” She asked, with a frown.

“I changed my mind,” said Edyth. “If we’re to turn him into bone, why not make him useful for you? Something to guide you along the way.”

“I… thank you,” said Matilde, but she was uncertain. Dutifully, she clutched the set of bones, but the thought of taking Giselbert – any part of Giselbert – with her to this new life she must create seemed wrong. “But he’s not… he’s not _in_ them, is he? It won’t be his spirit speaking through them?”

“God’s teeth, no!” Edyth shuddered at the thought. “Come, girl, a spell of cleansing to lift the blood from these flagstones, I know you can do it.” With scarcely a thought, Matilde began the magic to scrub the blood from the flagstones as if this were simply the cleanup after yet another difficult birth. “Good,” said Edyth, picking herself back to her feet slowly and casting a critical eye over Matilde’s handiwork. “No, girl, he is gone. The spirits of the dead cannot stay on and plague the living.”

Privately, Matilde disagreed. She knew that the look Giselbert gave her as he ran his hands through her hair would haunt her until the day she died: that hungry look, the shock of the pain entering his body, the sudden flickering of his life being extinguished. “Thank you,” she said again. “If they are a gift from you, then I’ll treasure them.”

“I hope,” said Edyth, and she seemed to be choosing each word carefully, “that a year’s learning with me has left you with gifts beyond a set of bones.” She ran a finger over the edge of the font, saw it came up clean, and nodded approvingly. “A good job. Fitting, really,” she said. “Do you remember the first night you came to me, a year ago?”

Matilde nodded. It seemed so long ago: an entire childhood had surely passed between then and today. It couldn’t have only been a year. “I was terrified,” she said. “I thought I was dying.”

“It began and ended in blood, in the end,” said Edyth. “Your apprenticeship.”

“It’s not an _end_ ,” said Matilde. “I’ll come back.” And Edyth gave her a look she didn’t much understand, a look of compassion, and pain, until Matilde could not bear to look any longer and turned herself to the door. She gasped. The door rattled, moved. Someone was here, someone was here, they were _discovered,_ she had been seen here and the whole plan was in tatters _-_ and then she took a deep breath as she realised what she saw.

A set of clothes, a boy’s clothes, a little big for her, had walked in through the door, slipped in and carefully shut it behind them. They had walked in without a boy in them: they were entirely empty, animated by magic, and Matilde saw the spreading smile on Edyth’s face and understood.

“A good fit?” Edyth asked quizzically. The clothes did not crumple to the floor but stood passively, their empty head turned towards her.

“I… yes, but… what if they’d been seen?” Said Matilde, still a little shaken.

“I made them unnoticeable,” said Edyth. “Now, quickly, see how you look.”

Matilde stepped closer and inspected the suit of clothing, the tunic, the long stockings. They were in good repair: with Edyth’s age, she had thought that anything she had set aside from children of her own would long been motheaten and shabby, but these looked as if the wool was freshly spun. Over one shoulder, the clothes had a knapsack tied to a good stick of elm, bulging with something. She reached out a hand to touch the knapsack, to feel what was in it, and at her touch, the whole set of clothes crumpled to the floor. She just barely caught the knapsack before it dropped.

“Food enough for a little of the journey,” said Edyth, “and a little money I had put aside, should you need it.” Matilde looked at her, gratitude overflowing in her heart. She knew she should say _no, you can’t possibly_ , or insist that Edyth take it back, but she could scarce afford to turn anything down. 

“Edyth, thank you. How can I ever-“

The old woman interrupted her with a smile. “Try the clothes on. Try them on, and lets see the young man who will be journeying to Hogwarts.”

***

The water in the font was still, was clear of blood, and Matilde looked at herself in it. As she’d put the clothes on, she’d found that they were miraculously a perfect fit for her, fitting well where she’d expected to drown in them – another spell of Edyth’s, no doubt. With her hair hacked back into something short and messy, and with these boy’s clothes on, she barely felt like she was looking at herself at all. She was looking at some stranger, some boy she barely knew with a long journey ahead of him. He already looked tired.

“Have you thought of a name yet?” Edyth asked.

“Not yet.” Matilde sighed. She had so much in front of her – must this new life be named right here, too? “How should I…” she shifted her shirt against herself, unused to these new clothes. They were not _really_ new, of course, but she had never worn clothes in her life that hadn’t been worn by someone else, and these must have been empty for so long that they were practically new again. “How should I pick the name? How did you name your son?”

She was instantly horrified at what she’d asked, but Edyth barely reacted. “For his father,” she said, “God rest _his_ soul, too. Eadwulf, son of Eadwulf. Named together, died together.” She sighed. 

“What happened to them?” Matilde asked. 

Edyth gave no reaction that she’d heard her. “You’ll have to give him a Norman name. Your English is better than most, but you don’t quite sound like you’re native born.” The old woman turned away from her, and Matilde wondered if she’d gone too far.

There was time enough to feel guilty later: right now, she had a name to choose. She had no father to name herself for, no brothers, no men she knew from whom she felt she could ask to lend her the quick use of a name. The closest the boy she was transforming into had to a father had been lying dead before her just minutes ago, and there was precious little chance she was taking Giselbert’s name. She thought back to years ago, to Normandy, to a time when Lord Jean was kinder and occasionally spared her a smile when she peeked out from behind her mother’s skirts. Her mother had been telling her a story of her _own_ girlhood, some tale meant to reassure the very small Matilde about whatever scrape she had gotten into that day. The particulars of the story were long forgotten, other than that it was some amusing devilry, but there was one detail that had stuck with her even a decade later: her mother had had a brother. Matilde had asked then where this brother was, if she had an uncle, and her mother had answered that he had gone on campaign in Sicily – it was another few years before Matilde even knew what that meant. For some time she’d been convinced that it was where bad children were sent, and had lived in terror that if she didn’t say her prayers every night and help her mother scrub the blackened hearth pot, she’d be sent to Sicily too. But what was the brother’s _name_? She tried to cast herself back, to shake off the years like the loose curls of hair still sticking to her shoulders – and then, as if summoned by magic, she had it.

“Robert,” she said. Edyth looked at her, one eyebrow raised. “For my uncle,” she said.

“It suits you,” Edyth said. She walked to Matilde slowly, and placed one hand in the water in the font. _Only she and I know that this was filled with blood, once_ , thought Matilde. _But not anymore_. Edyth lifted her hand high, droplets of water falling from it in the shaft of sunlight from the church’s window, and then she drew it across Matilde’s forehead: left to right, then top to bottom. The sign of the cross.

“I baptise you, Robert,” she said, with a slight smile. “May your sins be forgiven and may the communion of saints recognise you.”

“Amen.” Matilde shivered at the cold droplets of water, unsure whether Edyth was joking, unsure if she was either. “Thank you for not putting me under the water,” she said, returning the half-smile.

“And ruin Eadwulf’s clothes?” Edyth asked. There was a tension between them now, and Matilde looked away from her: Edyth’s face was impossible to read. “It was years ago now,” the old woman said, after a long pause. “They went to war. The boy and his father both took up the call, years back now, went with the old Earl to march with King Harold to fight back the Normans.” The church was still now, very still, and Matilde could not bear to look at her friend, did not want to see her pain across her face. Not knowing what else to do, she bowed her head. “I told them both they were damn fools for going,” said Edyth, something strained in her voice, “and that they were to come back alive or else I’d learn every unnatural magic I could and bring life back into their bodies myself.”

“And did you?” Matilde hadn’t meant to ask it, but she couldn’t help herself, the thought was too horrible.

“Of course not,” said Edyth, giving her a weak smile. “There’s plenty we can do with our art, Matilde, but no one comes back from the dead. Once the body is broken, the spirit is gone, and there’s no coming back from that.” She sighed. _The body is broken,_ Matilde thought, _broken, gone, and turned to a set of animal bones. He can’t come back. She’s said so._ “And besides, even if my magic could break down the gates of heaven and hell to drag them back, how would I even have started? I have no body, not one single bone of theirs. There’s nothing I could use for a grave, nor for a memory, nor even for those black arts. No man of mine ever made their way back to me, dead or alive. After the king fell, the only soldier who rode into town was his lordship,” she said, with a sigh, “and he… was not who I was looking for.”

“Edyth, I’m sorry-“

“Don’t be, girl. God only knows which Norman it is that killed them, but I’m sure it wasn’t you.” Edyth sighed, and Matilde put her arms around her. The old woman felt thin, bony, and somehow more frail than she ever had before. “Now, it’s time you leave. How’s that ankle?”

“Better,” said Matilde. Edyth released her from the embrace, and she stepped on each foot, testing her weight on the leg that had caused her so much trouble earlier. “Like I never sprained it.”

“Then you can travel well,” said Edyth, pressing forward some grim resolve. “There’s food enough in the knapsack for today, but if you leave now you’ll be able to reach Nottingham by dusk. Find Hereward. And from there…” She swallowed. “Safe travels.”

“I’ll miss you,” said Matilde, and it was true.

A long silence settled between the two women, long enough that for a moment Matilde was convinced Edyth had spoken every word left in her heart. But just as she thought that that was it, that she should simply set off and leave it there, Edyth spoke. “I was old when I had Eadwulf, older than most mothers. God only saw fit to bless me with one child, for all I wished for more. For a long time, I thought that my other children were the ones I brought into this world safely,” she said, and there seemed to be tears in her eyes. “But perhaps there have been other ways to gain a daughter than I thought.”

Edyth’s hands clasped hers tightly, and the two of them took one great breath together.

“Now, go,” said Edyth, and planted a single kiss on her forehead. Matilde realised she had a memory, a memory she’d not thought about for a long time, of her mother doing the same. One last gift from Edyth for the road. “Use a little magic to shield yourself until you’ve left the village. You can make good time on the road to Nottingham – perhaps you’ll be with Hereward before nightfall.”

“I’ll come back. I promise,” said Matilde. “I’ll find Hogwarts, I’ll get there, and I’ll send word if I can. But in a few years, once it seems safe, I’ll come back.”

“Then I will wait for your return.” Edyth sighed. “Farewell, Robert. Safe travels.”


	6. Armour Demands to be Worn

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Back with Edmund again! Much has changed at Hogwarts since we were last there.

**1074 Anno Domine**

It was eight years since the night of the thunderstorm and the confrontation in the chapel, when Edmund had arrived at Hogwarts.

He had seen plenty of other students begin their life there in that time. Unlike him, an ordinary student would slip quietly into the community and settle like snow over the hills around the black lake. Ordinary students came alone, or in ones and twos, and soon became a part of the life at Hogwarts as they found it. They did not travel with retainers, and did not send messengers ahead. There was no welcome feast planned, no grand ceremonies, no weeks of speculation beforehand.

But Baron Adric Malet, Edmund thought bitterly, was far from ordinary. 

“Come on, lad,” said Alfric, interrupting his brooding, “you’re miles away. I thought you were going to show an old man some magic?”

“Sorry, Alfric,” Edmund sighed. Alfric’s eyes had begun fading with age, and he saw less and less these days, but if the old man ever saw Edmund’s wand produce the flash of a spell, he would beam and turn his gaze to Edmund with a clarity he’d long lost.

Edmund turned his attention to the workbench in front of them, to the heavy coat of mail, the helmet, the sword in its scabbard. He was Godric’s apprentice, and his orders had been clear. By magical means or mundane, he was to remove the tarnish and polish each item until they were gleaming, ready for Godric to wear to the feast to welcome this new Norman baron.

The mail was by far the worst of the three. A brownish red discolouration that Edmund ardently hoped was rust seemed encrusted on: when he picked it up, the free movement of the links was restricted and could barely move in the worst areas. He may as well start there.

He grabbed a rag with one hand, his wand with the other, muttering “ _Aguamenti_ ” as Alfric looked on approvingly. Alfric may like seeing him use his magic, but it always felt faintly wrong to do so in front of him. Alfric was one of the few people Edmund could still speak to in English: the old man had little Latin, for all Edmund offered to teach him. He would simply say that Edmund’s brain was young, and had learned quick, but that he was too old to learn another tongue. So to perform spells, which Alfric could not do, to speak in the tongue of magic, which he could not speak… it felt as though he were pushing his oldest friend away, no matter what he said.

But there was no time to worry about this: the Baron was set to arrive that afternoon. There was work to do. Wringing the cloth out, Edmund began to scrub the armour down as methodically as he could. After a few moments he stopped, summoned more water to wash the orange-brown tarnish that had been collecting on the cloth and squeezed it out again.

“I hope you’ll be drying that mail as well as you’re cleaning it once you’re done, boy,” said the older man. Edmund scrubbed harder, wondering if it could help him avoid another lecture. “Else you’ll end up with it worse than it was when you started.”

“I will, I will…” said Edmund, wringing the cloth out again and doing his best not to think about if the dark liquid spattering on the floor was old blood. “How did it get so bad, anyway?” He wiped his hands on his tunic. “Does Godric ever even wear these? I’ve never seen him in the mail, and I only saw the sword when...” He trailed off, remembering the night he came to Hogwarts. The sword had been a flash in Godric’s hand, the light from every candle in the chapel reflecting as he raised it against Slytherin. But while he had carried the sword, Godric had been unarmoured: and as much as he tried to picture him in the mail coat before him, he was sure he had no memory of him wearing it.

“I cannot see the mess before you, lad, but I can imagine how arms and armour that have laid to rest so long are looking now. And that’s just it: the answer to your first question,” said Alfric, leaning back against the wall, “lies in your second.”

“What do you mean?” Edmund grunted, dealing with a particularly stubborn stain.

“No, he has not worn his mail or his helmet these last eight years we have been here,” said Alfric, “though when I first knew him, he wore little else, whether on the battlefield or at peace." His face went soft in the way it always did when he talked of the campaign of the Marches, of Alfric and Godric in their prime, fighting the Welsh. It seemed increasingly to Edmund that the past was the one thing Alfric could still see clearly. “And because he has not worn them these eight years, because the rings have not moved against each other and the helm has not tasted air, they’ll have become dulled. The rust will have set in. Armour demands to be worn, boy.” Edmund breathed a sigh of relief that what he’d been cleaning _was_ rust, and not the long-dried blood of some enemy of the crown. He held the newly clean metal up to the light coming in through the horn window and surveyed it with a critical eye. Well, he’d managed to roll back the years with a few magic words and plenty of scrubbing: it gleamed in the light like a fresh-caught trout.

He found himself looking over the mail coat, its workmanship, and feeling the sheer weight of metal in his arms. “But _why_?” Edmund asked. The mail alone had to be worth more silver than he’d be able to carry, without even mentioning the workmanship on the helm, the ruby embedded on the hilt of the sword… “If I had armour like this, I’d wear it every _day_ if I could. I’d honour it.”

Alfric gave a mirthless laugh. “Spoken like a lad who’s never seen war,” he said. Edmund rolled his eyes, confident it would go unseen, and muttered an incantation, letting a clean rag fly over the surface of the armour to dry up any stray droplets of water. “This stuff’s heavy, lad, heavy and wickedly uncomfortable.”

“You think I don’t know it’s heavy?” Edmund said, still holding the mail aloft while the rag did its work.

“There’s carrying it, and then there’s _wearing_ it,” said Alfric, “wearing that weight on your body while you march some thirty miles. Shield on your back, spear in one hand, and nothing in your belly but the feeling that the enemy may be behind every tree.” Despite everything, he sounded almost fond of being on campaign.

“Well, perhaps not _every_ day,” said Edmund, laying his burden back upon the workbench in a significantly better state than when he’d first started working on it. “But you’d think he’d have worn it _once_ while we were here. Why not for a Saints Day, or one of the feasts? But apparently he’d rather honour some invader Baron than-“

“Now, lad,” Alfric cut him off, cautioning him.

“It’s true!” said Edmund. He should have seen this happening. The conversation was becoming an argument, and he could try to grab the reins and pull it away from the path it was barrelling towards. All it would take would be a few kind words, some joke, and all could be well. And perhaps on another day, he could have done that, but today a Norman warlord was riding into Hogwarts to be welcomed with a feast, and Edmund was spoiling for a fight, even if it was with Alfric. “He said it himself, he wants to wear his armour as a mark of respect for Baron Malet, but he apparently doesn’t respect God and his Saints enough to-“

“ _Edmund_.” There was a fire in Alfric’s eyes that Edmund hadn’t much seen, and he quieted himself immediately. “You know as well as I that Godric has his reasons not to dress as a man of war.”

“I-“ Edmund tried to speak in vain, struggling to form his words, but Alfric paid him no heed.

“He took up arms in a church. We saw him, lad. He violated holy sanctuary, and on a man he considered his brother, at that.” Edmund shuddered. In the years since that night, since the duel, Gryffindor and Slytherin had not exchanged a single word with each other. If they could avoid it, they wouldn’t even make eye contact. However many times he heard it, he could hardly imagine the two men as friends. “If you want to talk of disrespecting the Almighty, Godric is _more_ than aware of his failures before God, I assure you.”

An uneasy silence settled in. Edmund knew he’d gone too far. Rather than face Alfric and see the older man’s expression, he picked the helmet up, holding it into the beam of sunlight to inspect for weathering.

“I’m sorry,” he said. He was talking slowly, picking his words. The creeping silence that would come and still his tongue whenever he felt overwhelmed was there again, but he could master it, he knew he could. “I didn’t mean to… I know how hard this has been on Godric. I shouldn’t have said that.” 

“What’s said is said,” said Alfric quietly. Edmund was glad that the old man wouldn’t see his face flushing with shame. “Now,” Alfric said, and his voice brightened, “let us put this behind us, lad. Look on that helmet for me, and tell me what you see.”

Even in this sorry state, the helmet gleamed in the sunlight, and Edmund let out a long breath, grateful for an excuse to talk of something else. He was accustomed to acting as Alfric’s eyes, but not with an object so fine.

“It’s beautiful,” he said, the words flowing easier now. “Less rusted than the mail, though the rings falling from the back don’t move as freely as they should.”

“Well, you know how to remedy that,” Alfric grunted. “But what about the face, boy?”

“It…” Edmund struggled to describe it. “It seems a little dulled, but it still shines. There’s a seam of gold running through it, along the nose, and then there are spots of tarnish under the frames of the eyes. But the face is carved to look like the face beneath, and then the cheeks have carvings inlaid on them – here, feel…” He took the helm and brought it to Alfric, who reached his hands out, running them over the figures of lions rearing that adorned the cheekguards.

The old man said nothing, and for some time the only sounds in the chamber were Edmund and Alfric’s breathing, and the tiny noise of the gentle motion of Alfric’s fingertips over the details emblazoned on the helmet. Finally, Alfric’s cracked voice broke the silence. “Thank you.” He pushed the helmet back to Edmund. “There are many memories – I can scarcely think of a time when I first knew him that he wasn’t wearing this. Perhaps there was something in what you said after all, lad. When you own a thing this beautiful…”

Edmund took it back and began slowly working on the discoloured spots again. “I’m glad you gave it back,” he said, “you ran your hands over it so much I thought you were cleaning it yourself.”

Alfric chuckled, and it seemed that the tension there had been between them eased. “Forgive an old soldier his sentimentalities,” he said.

“So,” Edmund said, waving his wand to take over scrubbing duties for him, “I know Godric has been in penance, but why _now_?”

“Sorry?” Asked Alfric, and while the helmet was gone from his hands, Edmund was sure he was still on some long distant battlefield.

“Why does he choose to take up his armour now?” Asked Edmund, moving the helmet through the light to inspect whether the enchanted cloth had managed to remove the worst of the stain. “Is his time of repentance over?”

“Godric was lucky not to be excommunicated entirely,” said Alfric darkly. “His penance will _never_ be over.”

“Then why is he wearing the mail again now? I _know_ that it’s not to honour Baron Malet, I do-“

“Oh, Edmund,” said Alfric, and gave him a fond smile. “You really don’t see it?”

“See what?”

“Godric and you are more alike than you realize, boy. The first Norman Noble comes to Hogwarts, with Harold Godwinson’s blood fresh on his hands, as far as Godric is concerned. Now, Godric has long since lost the war on if he will be educated here, but if ever there was a time for a man of war to dress the part, to make a statement? It is _now_. Would that I were still a young man like Godric and I could join him…”

“He’s not young,” said Edmund, setting the helmet down, admiring his handiwork. “You’ve said yourself you’re equals in years.”

“I think you’ll find he bears them a little better,” said Alfric with a smile. “Something about the magic in the blood means he’ll still be young when I’m cold in my grave.”

“I don’t know what you’re talking about,” said Edmund, smiling a little too brightly. Any difficulties between them could hardly last – Alfric was too old these days, too unsteady, for Edmund to hold any grudge against him too long. The old man was the closest he had to a family, was the last he had to remember Northumbria by. “You will live forever,” Edmund said simply, “and be telling me how best to clean my own arms when I am old and grey myself.”

Alfric chuckled dutifully. “If you say so, lad. Now, while we are on the subject, it is high time that that sword was cleaned…”

Edmund needed no further encouragement. He picked up the sword. It was wrapped tightly in a cloth, but even bundled up he could see the enormous ruby in the hilt, could see the elaborate filigree in the leather wrapped around the hilt. He let the cloth fall, showing that the blade was wrapped in a scabbard decorated with golden threads. There was a pregnant pause as he stared at the sword. He was sure he hadn’t seen it since that night, drawn in anger, and he’d barely been able to catch a good glimpse of it even then – and yet he knew, knew without looking, that this would be a work of fine art.

He drew the sword, daring for just a moment to be seven years old again, to be with Osbert, playacting at being a Huskarl. The blade should have been heavy, but fit perfectly in his hand like an extension of his arm, immaculately balanced. The craftsmanship was clear: dedication and care shone in every edge and every curve.

There was no tarnish on the sword: the blade shone bright, the ruby on the pommel glittered, and the leather wrapped across the hilt, immaculate and unmarked. Edmund didn’t think this sword _could_ tarnish, not really – how could something so well made be anything but perfect?

“How..” His voice was soft, almost reverent, “How did Godric make this? It had to be made with magic. I can’t imagine-“ he shifted the blade again, marveling at its beauty.

“I’m flattered that you think I could make a sword such as that,” came a loud voice from the door, and Edmund jumped, dropping the sword. For a moment, he saw it fall to the floor, and then it stopped, perfectly still, an inch above the dirty straw. He turned, and Godric stood in the door, smiling, wand pointed at the sword.

“I’m sorry, sir, I was just making sure that it was ready for the feast, I didn’t mean to-“

“Please,” said Godric with a smile, raising the sword to hover back at Edmund’s hand. “Don’t stop on my account. It does a boy good to see a sword and think of war, is that not right, Alfric?”

“That boy,” said Alfric fondly, “has been far more focused on examining your armour than cleaning it all afternoon.”

“Alfric, I-“ began Edmund, but the two old men were determined not to let him get a word in edgeways.

“ _And_ ,” Alfric continued, “when I knew him as a child, he would hear little else but stories of your exploits in it, Godric.”

Edmund hesitated, but Godric’s smile seemed unwavering. “Go on,” Godric said. “Take the sword. See how you fare.”

Edmund reflected on how much easier it was to spend time with the two of them together. Alone, Godric was morose. Left to his own devices, it seemed he would spend all of his time in the church at prayer, and he said very little. The enormous man seemed in some way to shrink, and Edmund could not imagine the sullen, mournful man wearing the coat of mail and not being utterly dwarfed by it. Alfric, without Godric, was withdrawn in a different way: quiet, shut away from the world by his failing eyes, and so much older. But when Edmund saw the two of them together, the spark they made would light up a room. Both men were younger, stronger, stood taller, and the night was sure to be filled with war stories, old songs, and entirely too much ale.

Both men were here, and in good humour. He grasped the handle of the sword. He lifted it and felt powerful, older – his feet positioned themselves in a duelling stance, and he took the slightest of swings, positioning the sword for the best way to strike an invisible foe.

“Now, strike at me,” said Godric.

Edmund hesitated. “But you’re unarmed…”

The two old men chuckled. “I like this one,” Godric says. “He thinks he can lay a blow on me!” He turned to Edmund and said, “well, I’m glad you’re so concerned about fairplay, Edmund. Perhaps if this will make it more fair?” He drew his wand from his belt, and Edmund remembered the duel with Slytherin, Godric fighting with his wand in one hand and his sword in the other. “Now,” said Godric, taking up a duelling stance to mirror Edmund’s, “strike me.”

Edmund could see the smile on Godric’s face, could see Alfric leaning close and doing his best to see. But now the sword was in his hand, there was some hesitation. He was not striking out against some hated enemy, he would be lunging at Godric. He would-

“Strike him!” Came a voice, and Edmund realized it was Alfric’s, turned unrecognizable with some emotion he did not recognize. There was nothing for it – he lunged forward with the blade. The world slowed for a moment: It was a wild, unskilled blow, but the sword was headed directly for Godric…

“ _Expeliarmus!_ ” Godric uttered a spell, flicked his wand quicker than Edmund could imagine and suddenly the sword jerked out of his hand as if snatched away. It flew through the air, skidding across the table, and came to a stop embroiled in the mail shirt. Godric smiled at him.

“You’re a natural,” said Godric, clapping him on the back hard enough to make him nearly lose his balance. “You have the makings of a fine swordsman. Perhaps I should be training such a promising pupil myself in the matters of war …” Edmund smiled, a grin so broad he was sure even Alfric could see it.

“I’d like that very much, sir.”

“Capital!” Said Godric. He took a look over Edmund’s handiwork, the effect of which was rather spoilt by the sword having knocked everything askew. “And you have done an excellent job equipping me for battle, Edmund. You do your country proud.” Edmund flushed with pride, but Godric barely paid him a moment’s attention. His mood had turned in a moment, and his suddenly sober face was turned towards Alfric. “Time runs short,” he said, “it cannot be long now.” He sighed.

A moment ago, Alfric had been as overjoyed as Edmund at Godric’s offer of tutelage, but there was a strange look on his face now that Edmund did not recognise “I never thought I’d see the day,” he said.

“Nor I,” said Godric, lazily flicking his wand and straightening the arms upon the table. “A Norman, come to Hogwarts,” he continued, his voice dripping with disdain.

“Well, we will be ready to meet them. Show them that there are some of us whose English necks have never had to suffer a Norman yoke,” said Alfric. Edmund had a sudden moment of clarity, and he could see Alfric, younger, clear-eyed and strong, the Alfric who had fought with Godric on the Marches and had been ready to die for God and his king. He was unused to this feeling between the two of them, this animated, dangerous mood, and he didn’t know what to do with it.

“I’d sworn,” said Godric, “I swore for eight years. Not one of them would so much as set foot on the drawbridge.” He let out a long breath and turned to Edmund, who shifted uncomfortably under his gaze. “You’ve done a good job with the cleaning of this, lad,” he said, waving a hand vaguely over the armour, “but you’re my apprentice, and make no mistake, we are at war. If you are to learn a soldier’s ways, it’s high time you learn how to dress a man for battle.” 

“Yes sir.” Edmund was glad to have a task to make himself feel useful, to have something he could do rather than sit and listen to this strange, frightening talk. It had been easy to say all these things himself, to unleash his upset on Alfric. But hearing these sentiments from the two old men, seeing Godric ready himself for battle, even if it were a battle where no sword would be drawn… it felt far different.

“You’re going to start by putting my mail on me. Now, pick it up-“ Edmund held the shirt, feeling it overflow a little in his arms, suddenly self-conscious about how he held it with Godric watching. Reaching his arms out, he added, “fold over the bottom edge, it will slide down my body easier. My arm is ready for the sleeve.”

“Like this?” Edmund asked, folding the bottom down and receiving a curt nod. He did his best to guide Godric’s large hand into the sleeves, hearing the man’s signet rings clink against the links of metal sliding over them.

“One Norman would be bad enough, but he brings practically an army with him,” said Godric with distaste. He shook one arm, wriggling his hand until the sleeves were fully around his arms. “Roll it down, boy, over my head,” he said near-automatically. “Servants and attendants.” He shook his head. “Pampered brat.”

“Still,” said Alfric, soothingly, “an army of grooms and valets is hardly an army. We will be able to provide a show of force for England and the King tonight, that much is for sure.”

“Would that we could have you armoured and with me, old friend,” said Godric, smiling at the dim eyes of his companion as Edmund slid the mail downward and let it settle, hanging around his body.

A pause, and something Edmund could not hope to understand passed between the two men, some moment of memory, or longing, or both. “Oh, you do not need me. You are a few years too late for me to be any use, I think,” said Alfric, with a smile that did not quite extend to his eyes.

The huge man shook his head, and Edmund heard the links in the mail jingle softly at every slight movement. “You stand,” Godric said, “as tall as any man at Hogwarts, Alfric. And if it were you taking a swing at me with this sword, and not the lad, I’d be in serious trouble.”

“Maybe once,” Alfric said, and the two men were smiling now, sharing something Edmund did not think he could understand. “Maybe once, if you had an arm tied behind your back, and that wand taken from you. Maybe then.”

“You have been my ally for many years,” said Godric quietly, “and together we have faced far worse dangers than one mere Norman Baron.” And suddenly, without any spell being cast that Edmund could see, Alfric looked young again. His face was as lined, his shoulders as hunched, but there was something in his bearing that seemed young, young and full of a fire that his stooped body could not hope to hold.

“I will be at your side, Godric,” he said, very softly. “I cannot wield a sword, but I will be there.”

“I know.” An eternity seemed to pass, an eternity in which Edmund could not bear to look at either of the two men. He felt young, very young and very stupid, as years of hardworn, battle-won understanding between Alfric and his comrade stretched before him. Finally, Godric snapped him out of his reverie. “Edmund, my helmet.”

“Yes sir,” said Edmund at once, grabbing the helmet and fumbling it in his haste. Godric raised an eyebrow but said nothing, and Edmund handed him the helmet, watching as the huge man placed it gently over his head. The golden sockets framed bright eyes now, staring out keenly at Edmund, and as Godric fastened the chinstrap, Edmund looked at the proud Huskarl standing before him. All of a sudden, he was eight years old again, playing in the river with Osbert and dreaming of a hero to strike down the Danes.

“A fearsome sight, is he not?” said Alfric, and Edmund felt as though the old man had been able to reach straight into his mind and pluck out his thoughts. “Scourge of the Welsh. I wish that my old eyes were still strong enough to see it.”

Godric let out a hearty laugh. “Believe me, your eyes serve you all the better. The years are starting to finally catch up with me.” He turned to Edmund. “Now, boy, the belt around my middle. Let us not tell Alfric that it perhaps fits a little tighter than once it did.” Edmund fastened the buckle, doing his best to laugh along with the two men; but something about their laughter seemed hollow. “The belt will keep the weight of the mail from all hanging from my shoulders,” Godric told Edmund, stretching his arms out to demonstrate, “and, of course, it is where you will fasten my sword. Hand it to me.” Edmund passed the sword to Godric, handling it carefully, like a holy relic.

Godric took the sword, fastening it to his belt in a swift motion, and once it was tied there, his hand moved to the hilt in its scabbard as if it were second nature. “I do not expect to use it,” he said, moving the sword just a fraction so that the ruby in the pommel glittered and shone in the torchlight. Edmund was none too sure if he was talking to either of the people in the room. He cast a guilty glance at Alfric, and, finding that worse, looked away. “But wearing a sword is not drawing a sword,” Godric continued, “and I cannot countenance going to meet an enemy without this foebiter, this bloodbringer at my side…” He shook his head, wondering at the very possibility.

Edmund thought back to his village, to the times the men would get ready for the Danes to come. Alfric had a sword. Edmund and Osbert used to beg him to show them: it was a plain, workmanlike thing, with none of the jewels or filigree of Godric’s. He could hardly remember now, but he thought that perhaps the blacksmith had had one too. But for the most part, the frightened men would clutch a scythe, a wood-axe, a sickle. When his father had died to the raiders, there had been no great vanquisher of foes in his hands. Perhaps if it had been a village of true warriors, if the men had had sword such as this to meet the enemy, all would have gone very differently.

A tear pricked his eye, and he did his best to escape Godric’s notice as he wiped it away. “You said you didn’t make the sword?” He asked, eager for a change in subject.

Godric gave him a smile, and Edmund hoped it was not because he had seen him cry. “As I said, workmanship like this is far beyond my skill, or that of any man, for that matter. The mail and the helm are made by human smiths, the best in all of England, but there are some things beyond all human hands, however much magic they may wield.” Inhuman hands? As Edmund gazed upon the ruby blazing in the sword’s pommel, he thought that surely the only beings that could make something so magnificent were the angels. “No, before I first swore my sword to the king, years before Hogwarts was even a dream, I travelled to the Holy Roman Empire. In the black forest there, I sought them out.”

“Sought who out?” Breathed Edmund. He hadn’t meant to say a word, but the vision of Godric, young, strong, on a noble quest, was almost too much to bear. He wished he could be that man so badly: determined, confident, wading into dangerous lands and with some great destiny ahead of him.

Godric smiled. “The kobolds,” he said, “the goblins, the fair craftsmen, the little people… oh, they had many names. But everyone could agree on their skill with metal, on their wicked, Godless ways… I had to go through many trials and play a few tricks of my own for them to make me this sword, but I prevailed.”

“What happened? What did they have you do?” Edmund looked first at Godric, then at the hilt securely within the scabbard at his side as if he had the power to somehow divine what adventures the man had gone through.

Godric took a long breath, and seemed near ready to answer when a clammering came from the courtyard outside. He turned to Alfric. “It must be time,” he said.

“I’m ready,” said Alfric, reaching for Edmund’s arm to guide him, and the boy sprang from Godric’s side to assist him.

“Sorry, lad, that story will have to wait.” Godric’s hand stayed on the hilt of his sword as he moved to the door. “Let us see what this Baron Malet is made of.”


	7. True Power Lies in the Blood

Every day Hogwarts seemed to grow. The central courtyard was near-unrecognisable from the cobbles and low cluster of wooden buildings that had greeted Edmund eight years ago. Stone walls loomed overhead, topped by battlements, and beyond them, slate rooftops and square towers clustered together like a crop of mushrooms. It felt as though every time Edmund walked across the courtyard, a new building grew in the distance: every time he walked the long corridor to the scriptorium, more doors lead from it to new chambers.

Today, the courtyard was packed with a heaving mass of witches: Hogwarts had turned out in force to see the Baron arrive. Once they had reached the courtyard, Godric had left Edmund to mill around with the other apprentices, and he stood with them now: a group of girls straining for a view of the gatehouse, a crowding of tall older boys, solemn older witches. Searching for a friendly face, Edmund tugged on the sleeve of Carwyn. Carwyn was perhaps ten years’ Edmund’s senior and had long completed his training, but he wasn’t like everyone else. He was an artisan and much in demand: he came and went as he pleased, staying at Hogwarts for a few months, travelling elsewhere, and if the mood struck him right he was happy to entertain a few questions about Britain and the lands beyond from a shy lad as the evening drew on.

“Aren’t they meant to be here?” Edmund asked. Now he was away from Saxon company, he switched to Latin. The change had been hard, once, but now he had lived at Hogwarts long enough he barely noticed the difference. “What’s the wait for?”

“Hush,” said Carwyn, barely sparing him a glance as he strained to see the gates. “Any moment now.”

“But that’s what they said-“

Carwyn swatted his hand away. “I said _hush_! We need to show the best of Godric’s men. Do you want us to be like Hufflepuff?

Edmund looked out over the other gathered members of the crowd. Ahead of him and the other apprentices, Godric’s armour glistened in weak afternoon sunshine, one arm outstretched to support Alfric. Opposite them, Rowena stood tall and proud, the diadem nestled among falling black locks, her daughter at one side, her apprentices behind her. For so many people being crowded together, there was an eerie hush. Most of the witches were fretting or simply staring out towards the gate, but Carwyn was right. Among Helga’s party it seemed positively festive. Her younger apprentices giggled, the elder witches exchanged barely-hushed whispers, and Edmund glared daggers at them. Did they not know how solemn and important this occasion was?

But past Helga and her pupils stood the _other_ group of Hogwarts students. The ones Edmund wouldn’t speak to. The witches who he wouldn’t even make eye contact with if he could help it. They stood as silent and ordered as Rowena’s witches, and at their head stood their leader. Salazar stood hunched and seemed almost lost in the mass of black fabric around him, but he had a defiant set to his jaw, and the eyes sunk deep in his sockets seemed as curious as anyone else’s to see the Baron.

Not, Edmund reminded himself, that he was _looking_ at Salazar and the Slytherins. Godric had not spoken to Salazar in eight years except through an intermediary. Godric barely spoke to the Slytherin apprentices, and as for their master, he would not even look him in the eye. This was less difficult than it seemed: while Godric had grown sullen and moody, Salazar had nearly disappeared. Godric threw himself to drink, or the church, but Salazar had devoted himself to Hogwarts with a near slavish devotion. Not as a school, not its people, but the buildings themselves. To hear the talk on the way into morning mass, whenever a new building had popped up overnight, that was Salazar’s work. When the lake near Hogwarts had expanded to a moat encircling the community, it was Salazar’s magic that had dug the ditches. And when whole groups of grown witches could no longer find their way from the great hall to the scriptorium because the corridors had twisted and changed so, it was Salazar’s name they cursed as they shook their fists at the uncaring stone. But his handiwork was far more evident than he. He did not sleep in the great dormitories, never came to mass, did not copy books of magic in the scriptorium, and was nowhere to be found at mealtimes; the last time Edmund had seen Salazar before this had been at the Yuletide feast. He had talked quietly with some of his own apprentices, exchanged brief words with Rowena and Helga, and quickly slipped back into the shadows. 

Edmund pointedly looked away from Salazar and his cohort, before realizing how conspicuous that must have looked, and decided to let his gaze wander over the courtyard as inconspicuously as possible. He wouldn’t want Godric to know he was looking at _them_. But at that moment, a stir began to spread through the courtyard, a rush of heads whipping to the gates, cut short conversations and intent gazes. After a moment, Edmund heard it too – hoofbeats. Horses were coming closer, lots of horses. The soft thud of horseshoes on dirt gave way to the clatter of hooves hitting the drawbridge, and then, in moments, the first of the Normans rode through the gate.

 _Is this him?_ Thought Edmund. If it was, the man was surely a disappointment. Sitting on a dappled horse, he was slender and much older than Edmund had imagined, with a scraggly mess of fair hair around his shoulders. Edmund had never seen a Norman before, but he had to admit that this man didn’t quite seem to be the conquering demon he’d imagined. For years now, the same image of a Norman had plagued Edmund. This Norman, this ruthless conqueror, looked much like the Dane he’d come face to face with nearly ten years ago now, when he’d disappeared by magic. A huge warrior, bare sword in hand, riding towards him on a pitch-black steed with a crowned Saxon head tied to the saddle. The phantom would come unbidden to Edmund’s mind when he tried to sit quietly at prayer, would ride into his dreams and leave him to wake up gasping for air in a cold sweat. But for all he held a vision of a Norman knight in his dreams, the man before him in the courtyard of Hogwarts was unassuming, shabbily dressed, and perhaps even a little nervous.

This man slid from the saddle to the ground, viewing the assembled community of Hogwarts with disinterest. The witches surrounding him had taken one long collective intake of breath, and that breath was being held around the courtyard, waiting for something Edmund couldn’t quite anticipate. Suddenly, in a voice that carried through not only the castle but that seemed to reverberate to the hills around, he spoke. “I have the honour of announcing, before God and the assembly of Hogwarts,” he began. He was speaking Latin, but the accent sounded clipped, alien, and it took a moment for Edmund to recognise at as such. _Of course_ , Edmund realised. _A herald._ No man as grand as Baron Malet would show up unannounced. “Baron Adric Malet, first Baron of Greystock,” he continued. “Son of Lord Guillame Malet, Lord of Graville, Lord of Eye Castle, High Sherriff of Yorkshire, High Sherriff of Norfolk and Suffolk. Keeper of the King’s peace, Hammer of the Saxons at Hastings...”

The titles droned on, but Edmund saw Godric flinch in some barely restrained twitch of anger at that last title, saw Alfric’s hand grip arm Godric’s arm a little tighter. He wished he were able to be with them, not lost among the other witches sworn to Godric. He should be sharing in that anger, helping in that comfort. He should be - but suddenly, there was no time to watch Godric, no time to wonder or to wish: the herald had fallen silent, because the Baron was here.

Horse after horse seemed to enter Hogwarts. Baron Malet came flanked by servants, retainers, guards – but there was not a moment’s doubt which of the Norman tide flooding the courtyard was the man himself. The Baron sat high astride a white stallion. Edmund, picturing the Norman knight from his dreams, found his eyes looking to the saddle, searching for some grisly trophy – but he was not quite the vision of terror he had imagined. True, he was dressed for battle, rings of mail falling around him and a pointed helm with a metal bridge down the nose atop his head. In fact, if Edmund craned his neck, he could just make out a sword at his belt. But the sword was in its scabbard, undrawn. The clean lines of the helmet shaded the Baron’s eyes, but Edmund could see his face moving, could _feel_ his gaze moving through the crowd. As that gaze fell on his, Edmund shuddered and looked away.

As his horse came to a halt, the Baron took his helmet from his head, shrugging away the chainmail coif underneath. Black hair flowed to his shoulders, but it was not the wild untamed mane Edmund had imagined. His hair was sleek and well groomed, his beard was cropped short, and those eyes continued to examine the whole school. Edmund ducked behind Carwyn, not wanting to meet Baron Malet’s gaze again.

Finally, as if he decided he had seen enough, Baron Malet dismounted, and spoke in that same strange Latin as his herald. “Thank you for your welcome.” Behind him, more horses were riding into the courtyard. A couple wore armour, but most did not: some even came on foot, bringing up the rear. Edmund saw a scrawny boy shuffle into the courtyard at the read, half-asleep with travel weariness. “I have travelled to Hogwarts for many weeks,” continued the Baron, “and I have been preparing for this pilgrimage for far longer.”

“Hail and well met,” said Rowena, stepping forward. Edmund glowered at her. He wished it was Godric speaking, wished he was holding this warlord to account. “My name is Rowena Ravenclaw, and I speak for the four founders and thus for all. Hogwarts welcomes you and your cohort.” She swept one arm around her expansively, encompassing the courtyard and all that was within it. “As you begin your life at Hogwarts, Baron Malet, you will swear yourself to one of the four founders.” All there had heard this speech, first when they were welcomed to Hogwarts (although, in Edmund’s case, a few days later), and then when subsequent members of the community arrived after. “You will be apprenticed before them: you will learn with them, work with them, and be their humble and most devoted arcane servant. Do you understand?”

“I do,” the Norman said. “And it will be my pleasure to choose to serve-“

Rowena held up one long-fingered hand, instantly silencing him. “It is not for the pupil to choose his master,” she said, and it cheered Edmund to see Baron Malet be chided. Who was _he_ to think he knew Hogwarts and its laws, to assume he could choose his own master? “It has long been the tradition of the four founders that we will choose our own apprentices, and as a mark of your noble blood, you will be chosen here before the entire community.”

A low chatter of protest broke out across the courtyard, and in front of Edmund, Carwyn leant across to a tall, thin woman. “How do they propose to sort him here?” He whispered, rolling his eyes. “Until Godric and Salazar will talk to each other, it takes _weeks_ to decide who just one person is to serve. Are we to wait in this courtyard until we are all as withered as Salazar?” The woman laughed, and Edmund wondered at Carwyn’s daring. He was no stranger to rebellious thoughts, but voicing them aloud was another thing entirely. He flushed with shame as he thought of his outburst before Alfric earlier, of the old man’s scolding: it would be a long time before he showed the same bravery as Carwyn again.

“Of course, my lady.” When the Baron spoke, the whole courtyard fell into silence again. Peeking around Carwyn, Edmund looked at the man, so different from what he had expected and yet no less dangerous, trying to work out what magic this man could cast to have an entire courtyard eating out of his hand. “It will be an honour to serve whoever will have me.” 

“Ordinarily this decision is undertaken with many days of prayer and patient debate,” said Rowena as though acknowledging the mutters that had spread around the courtyard. “However-“ and at that, a sigh of relief spread around, which Rowena acknowledged only with the minute movement of one eyebrow, “it would not do to keep such an illustrious guest waiting.”

 _You’d think the angels themselves had blessed us with their presence,_ Edmund thought, rolling his eyes. He looked to see if Godric was able to maintain a straight face through this charade, but it was hard to see him from behind Carwyn. Rowena snapped her fingers, the small sound of the click ringing far further amid the packed mass of witches than it had any right to: her daughter Helena came forward, nervous, looking down. She was carrying something… Edmund jostled another apprentice, unsuccessfully trying to shift to get a better view of what the girl was carrying in her hands. Before he could discern what the crumpled bundle was, Rowena took it from her, giving the girl a curt nod of thanks, and lifted it high in the air above the crowd. The air seemed to breathe some life and shape into the object, and Edmund looked at it, confused.

“Four founders stand before you,” said Rowena, the object held aloft, “myself, Helga Hufflepuff, Salazar Slytherin, and Godric Gryffindor.” The shifting of the crowd before him let Edmund catch a glimpse of Godric, who stood stonefaced. “Each of us prizes different qualities in the apprentices we take. Your character will be assessed, your spirit will be tested, and we will decide who would make a fitting master for you.”

The crush of people around Edmund had shifted slowly, inexorably. Everyone wanted to be closer, to see this new sorting. He was no longer next to Carwyn, but a throng of far older and taller witches than him blocked his view of Rowena. Her long, slender arms were holding something to the sky, something that looked familiar, but he could not see it. But by some unhappy chance, some gap in the crowd, he could see the Baron directly. The man was looking gravely at Rowena, and with a quick motion he summoned one of his attendants. Malet handed him his helmet before beginning to pull off one of his leather gloves. Edmund gasped. Was Baron Malet going to throw the glove to the floor? Had he selected a trial by combat? Would he dual each founder one by one? Would he-

“I am ready to be tested,” said the Baron, cutting through Edmund’s racing thoughts, and handing the glove to the same weary looking servant. _Well, maybe not a duel,_ thought Edmund, trying not to feel disappointed. The Baron’s long fingers intertwined, and he continued, “and I promise my full fealty to my new master.” His eyes were no longer just on Rowena, and he seemed to be addressing the whole courtyard now. “People of Hogwarts! I come before you a man rich with land and with silver, but once I have had my master selected, I will be simply your newest novice.” He pulled his hands apart and something glittered in the light as Edmund strained to see. “From today, I will set aside my family, my title. My fealty will be solely to my new master, to our community of witchcraft, and to Hogwarts itself.” He opened his hand, and Edmund saw it: his signet ring, pulled from one finger and glittering in the afternoon light. It seemed to hang in the air for just a moment before it fell and hit the dirt.

A rush of excited chatter flowed around the courtyard. “Grand words,” Edmund heard Carwyn say to the woman he was with. “Let’s see if he lives up to them. He certainly brought a lot of servants for one committed to humility.” Edmund was inclined to agree, and wanted to tell Carwyn so, but the crowd was shifting again. Suddenly he had a clear view on Rowena and the item she held aloft, and looked at it, confused.

“A noble sentiment,” Rowena continued, “and one that will be considered by the judge of your new allegiance.” Edmund stared – why, exactly, was she holding Godric’s old hat aloft? He had seen it often enough, blocking the sun from Godric’s eyes in the courtyard or jammed onto his head as he saddled up for a hunt: and there was no way it could be any other hat. He even recognised the patch. What was Rowena _doing_ with it? “The four of us have woven our magics together,” Rowena continued, “imbuing this new judge with a little of our own intentions, and so it will make our decision for us. Baron Malet, will you stand for judgement?”

“I will,” the Baron said, and Rowena lowered the hat onto his head. Edmund seethed at seeing this Norman wear something that was so very Godric’s. Why had he allowed this?

The moment the hat touched the Baron’s head, it began to move, to twitch. It moved as if possessed, and Edmund heard gasps echo around the courtyard. The Baron was lost in concentration, eyes closed, and Edmund could see him mutter something, unsure what it was. The whole experience looked so strange, so bizarre, that Edmund half-hoped that this was all a trap, that the hat was cursed in some way. But a moment later, an old tear – Edmund remembered Godric’s breathless tale of the bear’s claw that had done it – began to open up. _It’s tearing itself apart,_ thought Edmund, as if he should have known a hat of Godric’s would barely consent to sit upon a Norman head. But the tear opened wider before moving like a mouth, and a voice echoed from the hat across the entire courtyard.

“Slytherin!” Cried the hat and an outburst of jubilation from Slytherin’s apprentices punctured the silence. They whooped, clapped, thumped their palms against their chests, and Edmund felt unmoved. If this Norman Lord had to come to Hogwarts, best he was in a house that Gryffindor already had no dealings with. But then he saw the Slytherins’ master, standing silently but with a smile spread wide across his face. He was unsure if he had seen Salazar smile before, and it unnerved him so deeply that he could not help wishing the Baron had made his way under Helga or Rowena’s command.

Rowena held up a hand, and the courtyard fell silent again. But before she could speak, the croaking voice of Slytherin echoed across the courtyard. “Baron Adric Mallet,” he said in that strange accent, stranger even than the Baron’s. It sounded so unfamiliar, and Edmund realised suddenly how long it had been since he last heard the man speak. Had he even heard him say a word since the night of the duel with Godric? “I would welcome you into my tutelage,” Slytherin said. He seemed to have barely raised his voice above a cracked whisper, and yet it carried through the whole courtyard like a clarion call. “But first, tell me. Your parents; are they of our blood?”

Edmund looked on confused. What did Salazar mean? Surely he was not also Norman? “My father,” the Baron began, the hat still perched ridiculously upon his head, “has not the tiniest inkling of our power, although he is not blind to its uses. But my Mother…” He made a complicated gesture with his hands. “She had no training, and she died as much a novice as I stand before you today. But she was blessed with the gift of prophecy, as am I.”

Salazar nodded. “As I suspected, of course,” he said. “The true power lies, as ever, in the blood.” Edmund glared at him, forgetting entirely his earlier mission not to even look at the man. His parents may not have had their own magic, but he knew his own skill well enough: he could summon, banish, charm protect as well as any other apprentice his age. Was he any less worthy? “We will hone that power in time. You and your men will be fine apprentices to me.”

What was that he had said? A chorus of whispers began around the courtyard, trying to make sense of Salazar’s last words. But before the ripples could grow to a wave, Salazar stepped back, and Rowena raised a hand for silence: within a moment, she had it. “It is decided,” she said, and removed the hat from the Baron’s head. It flopped downwards, strangely lifeless again, and Rowena handed it back to Helena. “Baron Malet will swear fealty to Salalzar Slytherin and will learn and serve under him.”

“When he’s around,” said Carwyn in a barely-hushed whisper that Edmund could not help but admire him for.

“Baron Malet and his retinue will serve Salazar well, and they will swear their oaths at the feast-“ Rowena began again, but she was drowned out immediately by an outcry from across three houses.

“His entire retinue?”

“-seems unfair that Salazar would get _dozens_ of new students at once when-“

“surely she can’t mean that-“

The voices of protest echoed around Edmund, and the courtyard seemed united in uproar, but Rowena stood as unmoved as a rock against the tide. The clamour of voices rose and swelled, but she stood solidly, the silver circlet around her head, and raised one hand – and slowly, the voices began to fade.

“The four founders have spoken,” said Rowena simply, as if that were an end to it – and somehow, for many there, it was. Edmund saw Carwyn muttering something to his companion but was unable to catch it. “The new Slytherin apprentices will swear their fealty at our feast to welcome Baron Malet.” 

She lowered the hand and departed towards the great hall, and after a moment’s confusion, her apprentices followed. All seemed calm now, subdued save a few rebellious mutterings, but Edmund stood fuming as the Gryffindors began to move around him. How had Slytherin pulled the coup of acquiring dozens of students, easily a whole year’s worth, in one afternoon? Why did this new method of sorting, this hat of Godric’s that spoke, just happen to gift Slytherin the most power of all the founders? 

***

“By the Lord and all that is holy, I pledge myself to the service of Hogwarts. I will be as a brother to all those here and I will devote myself, body and mind, to their service and the pursuit of arcane glory. On this holy relic I pledge homage to Salazar Slytherin. I will love all that he loves, and shun all that he shuns, according to God's law, and according to the world's principles. I will never do anything loathful to him, whether by will or by force, by word or by work. This I swear on the condition that he will keep me as I am willing to deserve, and all that fulfil that our agreement was, when I to him submitted and chose his will. So help me God.”

Edmund glowered as the kneeling Norman guard kissed first the staff of Merlin that Salazar was holding, then stood slowly and kissed Salazar himself. Just as the five men before him had. With each man, though, the imbalance in Salazar’s ranks grew wider, and Edmund had a harder time pushing aside his fury.

“By the Lord and all that is holy…” began the next Norman, and Edmund tore his eyes away. The four founders were sat at the high table, with guests seated around them. Alfric was Godric’s guest; Rowena’s daughter plucked at a harp, the melody flowing like honey. Edmund wished that the room was quiet, that the chatter of apprentices and the droning of oaths would die away and that he could hear the music properly. 

“… when I to him submitted and chose his will, so help me God,” the novice concluded, before kissing the staff and kissing Slytherin. The Baron was seated in the position of honour at the high table, and looked over at the man he had brought, nodding approvingly as he joined the swelling ranks of Slytherins. Another Norman came up to pledge himself, and, seemingly bored, the Baron’s gaze shifted to watch Helena’s slender fingers plucking the harpstrings.

Godric sat a few seats away from Baron Malet. He seemed calm, calmer than Edmund at least. His flagon of ale was already drained, and Edmund saw him tap it with his wand to refill it – but that was nothing unusual these days. Edmund couldn’t understand. How had Godric sat aside and let this happen? Rowena had said that all four of the founders had worked on this hat together, and indeed it had been _Godric’s_ hat – why had he done this? Why had he let Baron Malet come at all?

“By the Lord and all that is holy…” The newest Norman began his oath. It was the young one, the one around Edmund’s age who had walked into the courtyard and seemed nearly asleep. He looked nervous, and Edmund found himself squashing rising sympathy for him. There was something different about this oath, something he couldn’t place… he shook his head. What did he care for a Norman boy anyway? The helmet Slytherin’s newest apprentice had handed back to his master was back on his head now, and Edmund found himself staring at the Baron in the dancing candlelight of the great hall. Each flame reflected in the smooth burnished iron of his helmet, a thousand dancing pinpricks of light, and Edmund realised that it was not just Godric who had dressed for war.

Seeing the two men next to each other, the contrast was striking. Godric’s helmet was art: the inlaid gold, the fine designs, the subtleties of shape. But the Baron’s was simple, clean-cut. Evenly spaced lines of rivets were the only adornment on his helmet, and no jewels decorated the handle of his sword. Godric had said that he was dressing for war, but it was a mock war, of games, of impressions. His armour and weaponry were there to protect him, but also to show off his money, his titles, his magical skill. War was not a game to Baron Malet. He wore armour that was well-made, and expensive, but made for one thing only – killing, and killing well.

“… according to God’s law, and according to…” the Norman boy droned on, and Edmund tried to think what sounded different about him, why this one oath sounded so different to the others. He knew the oath well enough – he had sworn it himself eight years ago, had sworn it to Godric. He remembered being carefully guided through it in English, for he hadn’t yet a word of Latin. He had sworn to ‘shun all that he shuns’, and these long years with the Slytherins, today with the Baron and his cohort, they all seemed determined to make him live his vow. The words were so familiar, exactly the same as those he had said eight years ago, so what _was_ the difference? The boy seemed to shake slightly, but it couldn’t just be nerves, there was something else – and then, with horror, he was distracted from all thoughts of the oath entirely.

The Baron leant across Helga, who was sitting stolidly between him and Godric to keep the peace, and he said a few words to Godric. The droning of the oath and the chatter of the great hall, of hungry mouths eager for the ceremony to be over, made hearing what it was impossible, but Edmund tensed, expecting the worst. He saw Alfric frown, and readied himself. Whatever the Baron had said, Edmund could not imagine it was good, and he could not see Godric reacting well. He saw it all flash before his eyes: Godric would reply with something terse, and an argument would break out. Godric would draw his sword again. There would be another duel, a terrible one. Even if Godric won and struck down Baron Malet as he so rightly deserved, he would be excommunicated, would be cast out of Hogwarts.

“This I swear on the condition…” The oath continued, but Edmund had eyes only for Godric, his knuckles gripping the edge of the Gryffindor table so tightly the bone showed white through the skin. _It’s happening again,_ he thought. _It’s happening again, and I can’t stop it._ Godric’s reply seemed to satisfy the Baron and he nodded. Edmund exhaled slowly. Perhaps it wasn’t as bad as it seemed. Further down the table, Carwyn let out a huge laugh at something the tall, pretty witch had said, and Edmund began to let his grip on the table ease.

“… and chose his will, so help me God.” The Norman boy finished his oath, the last of the Baron’s party to do so. He kissed the staff and looked at Slytherin and winced before kissing him. Edmund couldn’t help but feel sorry for him, and shuddered imagining how it would feel to touch Salazar, let alone kiss him. Disaster at the high table seemed averted, and Edmund let himself look at this boy and try to figure out what had felt so different about his oath. Each word had seemed exactly the same as when Edmund had sworn himself to Godric eight years ago. Why was it that this seemed so familiar, so alien, all at once? He watched as the boy stood slowly, walking to the Slytherin table with the rest of the Baron’s men. Along the way, he stumbled on the tail of the robe from an ancient Slytherin witch, tripped, and fell. The old witch turned around and chastised him, a torrent of angry latin too fast even for Edmund to follow, and the novice picked himself up, apologising in a few words of English.

And suddenly it made sense. The oath _had_ been familiar, had been word for word the same as Edmund’s, because the Norman was repeating his oath in _English_. Edmund had spoken no Latin back then, and Godric had guided him through the oath in English – he still remembered the words after all of these years. All of the Baron’s party had been sworn in in Latin, but this Norman boy… Well, Edmund corrected himself, was he even a Norman? He eyed him curiously, trying to make his mind up. He could not see him closely, could not get a good look, but those features didn’t _look_ particularly Saxon. And yet the English he spoke had been without that strange, clipped accent the Normans had when they spoke Latin – he spoke as if he were born here. What would a Saxon be doing with a Norman party come to Hogwarts? Was he taken here as a slave of war? Dragged against his will? He could put nothing past the Baron, and he looked up at the high table as if to divine what ill intent had let this happen.

Baron Malet and Godric were talking across Helga again, and for a moment, Edmund felt a terrible urge to stand up, to run toward high table and do something, anything, to prevent the argument that must surely be coming. The two men stood up, and Edmund tried to shout, but the old fear came and snatched his tongue again. He opened his mouth, mute, as the two men came together, arms outstretched, and clasped hands.

He stared. Godric and Baron Malet, previously deep in conversation, shook hands. The two men exchanged smiles, saying words Edmund felt suddenly glad he could not hear, and sat down again. Edmund could say nothing, but he didn’t know what he _would_ say. Godric and the Baron, shaking hands. A Saxon in the Norman party at Hogwarts. Godric’s hat brought to life and doing what could only be Slytherin’s bidding.

Something was wrong, very wrong indeed. He only wished he knew how to find it.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> For anyone curious about the oath, I've adapted it from a historical one from The Laws of Alfred, Guthrum, and Edward the Elder - you can find it here. https://sourcebooks.fordham.edu/source/560-975dooms.asp
> 
> I'm curious about writing another version of this chapter as a one-shot, of the first sorting at Hogwarts from the Baron's perspective - let me know if you think that might be something you'd be interested in reading, as I'm not quite decided on whether it would be worthwhile.


	8. War Games

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> A quick note: this chapter, and some coming ones, contain horses.  
> I have never ridden a horse in my life, as far as I can remember. I've done my best to do a little research but please, if my horses are All Wrong, let me know in the comments and I will endeavour to fix the horses.

“A hunt?”

Edmund stared at Alfric. The old man had been perfectly clear, but Edmund could hardly believe it.

“Yes. There are only a few hours, Edmund, you will need to-“

“I don’t understand.” The dormitories were empty. Everyone else had already made their way to the chapel; Alfric had drawn him aside just as the last of them were leaving. Edmund rubbed the sleep from his eyes and sighed. “A hunt with him? With the Baron?”

“That is what Godric said.” Alfric leant on the wall and sighed. After Godric and Baron Malet’s handshakes at the sorting yesterday, Edmund had watched with increasing anger as the two men had drunk together and talked long into the night. Not even the mystery of the Saxon boy among Baron Malet’s party had been able to distract him for long from the sheer madness he was watching unfold before him, and when he’d gone to bed last night, he’d been hoping he would wake to dismiss it all as a bad dream. But here was Alfric before him to tell him that the Baron and Godric were going together on a hunt. “You should hurry,” Alfric continued, “and go to him.”

“But…” Edmund wasn’t sure if he’d ever hesitated to follow an instruction from Godric before, but the Godric he had seen last night had scarcely seemed Godric.

“He requested you _specifically_ , Edmund.” Alfric looked at him, his milky eyes full of something – pity? Confusion? Edmund’s years at Hogwarts had taught him to read Latin and even a little English, but he could no more read Alfric’s mood than he could read runes. “He requested _you_. You are to join him on a hunt for the first time, is that not a cause for celebration?”

_It would have been_ , thought Edmund, but all he heard himself say was, “I’m late for the Primes mass already, I can’t-“

“If even Godric can miss mass today, surely you can too?”

Edmund tapped his foot uncertainly. He had no particular love for the service and doubted he would be missed, but both of them knew that was hardly the true source of his reluctance. “Why is he doing this, Alfric?”

“I believe Baron Malet is something of a seer, lad, and has used his gifts to divine where a fine stag can be found this morning. Godric did not want to miss-“

“No, you know what I mean.” Silence fell between them for a moment as Alfric looked at him helplessly. “He was dressed for _war_! He was ready to put on a show, to intimidate him. That’s what you said!” He blinked, hard, trying to stop the betrayal of yesterday evening from welling over into tears. “And now he’s making _friends_ with him?”

Alfric smiled. “My eyes don’t see so well anymore, lad, but I fancy they can see the lines of this battle better than you. Godric is going hunting with the Baron because the Baron asked him. And on a hunt, what better opportunity to keep score? To win another victory?”

Edmund looked at him uncomfortably, and sighed. “I don’t know if I have a stomach for this kind of war,” he said. He fumbled at his belt for his wand, muttering a spell to bring the bucket in the corner closer, and a second to fill it. _I’m not making a decision right at this moment,_ he thought. _I’ll need to wash up just the same if I’m going to mass or if I’m going on the hunt._ But he heard the primes bell begin to toll distantly, and knew that the decision was fast being made for him.

“Me neither,” said Alfric. “Edmund, the water, before you wash?” Edmund didn’t know why he needed to ask. He handed Alfric the bucket, just as he did every morning, feeling the old man’s gnarled hands brush his as he took it from him. He raised it above his head, pouring the water to drink from such a height that the water splattered all over his face and chest, leaving him dripping. He handed the water back, invigorated, and for a moment Edmund imagined the years dropping away from him, imagined his eyes clearing and him being as ready for the hunt as Godric.

“How can _you_ not understand?” Edmund asked, taking back the empty bucket. “You see everything clearly enough to explain to me. All of these schemes… I don’t know, Alfric. I wish Godric and I were taking up arms for battle, real battle, not this hunting trip.”

“No,” said Alfric, “you don’t.” He said it so quietly that a chill ran down Edmund’s spine, and for a moment it felt like it was him who had covered himself in ice-cold water. “Until you’ve been knee-deep in the muck, until you’ve felt the blades on your shield and heard the screams, you don’t get to wish anything about war.”

Edmund bowed his head. “I’m sorry.”

“You didn’t mean anything by it, I know,” said Alfric stiffly.

“You make this hunting trip sound not so bad,” Edmund said with a faint smile.

“Perhaps. I never had the head for this sort of war, lad, I didn’t. I can see the lines of troops moving, can begin to understand why Godric does what he does, but if you put me in his place, I’d be lost. We’re both men of war, but it was him who was the politician, the commander – all I was ever good for was making up the shield wall and killing whatever poor bugger was on the other side.” There was a long silence, a true silence, because the bell for morning mass fell still. The only sound to break it was Edmund’s muttered _aguamenti_ to refill the bucket and begin washing. “So,” said Alfric eventually, “did I hear you say you’d be going on the hunt with Godric after all?”

“Perhaps,” said Edmund. He had no real excuse now, but he was still far from certain. Edmund couldn’t but think that if Alfric had the full use of his eyes, if he could have just _seen_ the look that had passed between the two men, the bright smiles as they shook hands, he would not see this as another war game.

“It is a great honour for you to be invited,” said Alfric, carefully. His eyes were fixed on Edmund, almost focused. “It’s everything I’ve wanted for you since we left Northumbria.”

_Everything I’ve wanted, too_ , Edmund thought, but he didn’t say it. He was washing himself now, and it made it easier not to look at Alfric. “I’m thinking about it,” he said, fully aware that there was no way he would make it to mass by now and that he was short on other excuses. “I just… I wish I understood, that’s all.” The words came easy now, flowing freely with no barriers before them. “How is it so easy for him?”

“What do you mean?”

“Godric could not even talk to Salazar for eight years. He can’t even look at him. And yet the moment the Baron comes, the … Godric is still happy to talk with _him_ , and shake hands with him, and to go on a hunt with him? I don’t understand what happened.” He tried to keep his voice steady. There were tears waiting for the chance to flow, and he wouldn’t let them.

“I cannot say I understand it,” Alfric said slowly, “not entirely.” “But it’s different between Godric and the Baron and between him and Slytherin.”

“How do you mean?” Edmund asked, blinking hard.

“Godric and Salazar were friends. As close as brothers. Godric loved him dearly, and still does.”

“And yet he finds it easier to talk to the Baron, a stranger, and no less his enemy-“ said Edmund, shaking his head. He felt the more Alfric and he talked of Godric, the less he understood.

“Perhaps it is hard to understand when you are young,” said Alfric, shaking his head. Edmund began an indignant reply, but the older man cut across him. “But it is _because_ of that love that they shared that it is harder for him. But the Baron is-“

“A Norman!” Said Edmund breathlessly. “An invader!” Perhaps if he focused on his righteous fury about Baron Malet, he would be too angry to cry.

“A _soldier_.” Said Alfric firmly. “A young man, a man of war, like him.”

_But Godric isn’t young_ , Edmund thought, but he didn’t let it reach the tip of his tongue. He remembered what Alfric had said to that yesterday, and he hated to think of Alfric as old, as frail.

Edmund shook his head. “But the Baron is the _enemy_. Even more than Slytherin, even-“

“Spoken like a green young man who’s never been to war,” said Alfric with a faint smile, clapping Edmund on the back. “The enemy is the enemy on the battlefield, but he’s there for the same reasons as you, lad. Fortune. Loyalty to his king. Glory. Get to be an old soldier, lad, fight in enough wars, and you’ll find that sooner or later you’re fighting side by side with the same men you’d have struck down once upon a time.” Edmund bowed his head. Alfric had a way of talking that made him feel like Alfric was far too old, and he was far too young, and that everything was hideously unfair. “Think of Rowena,” Alfric continued. “When Godric and I first knew each other, we were locked in terrible war with the Welsh. And has that ever stopped him from being her friends?”

“Yes but Rowena isn’t a soldier-“ Edmund began, before pausing. Rowena may not be a soldier, but he thought of her standing tall and elegant, wand in hand, and knew he would not want to see her and Godric duel. Alfric sensed his hesitance, and chuckled. “Well,” Edmund continued, “It’s not the same. It’s a different _kind_ of war.”

“War is war, lad,” said Alfric with a shrug. “If the Welsh had killed him, he’d have been just as dead.” Edmund took a long breath, trying to find the right words to say, but Alfric interrupted him. “Edmund, the hunt.”

“I know,” Edmund said heavily. There was no avoiding it any longer. He felt as though he’d been stalling for time, as though he had made the decision long before, but had been trying his best to ignore it up until now.

“He is expecting you, Edmund. In the courtyard. You should go.”

“I know,” said Edmund. “I’ll be there. Even if I don’t understand everything.”

Alfric wrapped his arms around Edmund, hugging him tight. “Thank you.” Once, when Alfric had embraced him, he had been so tall, so broad, that it had felt like being encircled by the whole world. But Edmund was older now, was nearly grown, and he was as tall as Alfric. Alfric seemed almost small in his arms now, some fragile thing, brittle boned. “Your first hunt,” said Alfric. “I hope you know how proud I am.” He took a long, shaky breath.

“Of course I do,” said Edmund. He tried his best to look past the Baron, to focus on the hunt itself.

“A personal invitation from Godric,” said Alfric. “He has taken a close interest in you, lad. He sees something in you. This is your path to greatness.”

“He sees something,” said Edmund, smiling and stepping back from Alfric’s embrace, “because you brought him to me. Because it is you bringing me. I am here because of you, Alfric, and if it weren’t for you…”

“I did what I could,” said Alfric, “and nothing more. Any distinction you’ve won is _yours_ , and nothing more. Do you understand? It’s not me who has learned to use a quill, not me who can find what is lost, can conjure a fire, lift a rock without touching it, and summon sweet water each morning. I have done what I can to help, but you are here because you are a great witch, and nothing more.”

Edmund sniffed, wiping his eyes with his sleeve: any attempt he had been making not to cry was long abandoned. “I am here because of you,” he said, simply. What else was there he could say?

“Best you get going,” said Alfric, his own voice sounding a little strained. “Go to the hunt, Edmund. Do Godric proud. Do me proud.” He clasped Edmund’s hand, just one moment. “And perhaps, when you are there, you will learn a little more of war.”

***

By the time Edmund arrived at the courtyard, however, any hopes he would be able to start the special moment of his first hunt with kind words from Godric were quickly disillusioned. Godric was standing in a tight knot of other men, talking animatedly while a pack of greyhounds bounded around his feet. The dogs were jumping up to lick him and receive the scratches behind the ears that he gave, But Godric never lost focus from the group around him. Edmund recognised Carwyn there, laughing a little too hard at a joke. There were men he didn’t recognize… and then, with a sick swoop of his stomach, he recognised the Baron standing at their centre. He was no longer in armour, and was instead dressed in fine clothes, too expensive by half for a hunt – but Godric, too, was dressed in all his finery. _Probably another battle manoeuvre_ , thought Edmund, hastily inspecting his own run-down clothes and hoping this didn’t mean he was being a bad soldier.

He watched the knot of little hunting witches from a distance for a few minutes. He had been invited, and he had every confidence that he had as much of a right to be there as anyone. He certainly had more of a right than the Baron and his lackeys who were milling around him, casting distrustful looks around the courtyard. But the thought of going to this group of men, of trying to get their attention, of entering into this group and the war that was surely bubbling under the surface, was more burden than he was prepared to shoulder just yet. Better to watch, to wait.

Godric directed grooms to the stables with a few words, which made Edmund nervous: he had ridden a little before, but it was _very_ little, and with little success. The mare that had pulled the cart he had ridden to Hogwarts, an age ago now, had been an excellent horse to learn to ride on, Alfric had said. She was calm: she would never throw him, never bolt, and he would be perfectly safe. Alfric had been entirely right, but he had missed one important detail: she also had no interest in heeding any instruction he gave her. Experiments with other horses had borne little more fruit. He had been so focused on the honour of hunting with Godric, on the horror of Baron Malet having organised the hunt, that he had barely thought through the practicalities. He sighed. Perhaps, however great the honour, it would have been better after all to simply pretend Alfric had not delivered the message, and to have gone late to mass.

The hunting party did not seem to have noticed Edmund yet. He tried to examine them as two lines of men in a war, tried to see as Alfric would see, and he began to understand. He saw two groups of men, two groups standing together and engaged in seemingly friendly conversation: but Godric’s men and the Normans stood only with each other. Those jokes, those bragging cries and hearty handshakes? They were among members of the same side, but a Saxon barely said a word to Norman, or the other way around. Even Godric’s dogs barely wanted to pay heed to the interlopers. The only place the two groups intersected at all were Godric and the Baron, who occasionally traded a few words to each other, and when they did, the hawk-like eyes of every man there were on them, judging, watching for any moment of weakness.

It was refreshing to see this from the outside, to begin to understand some of all he had talked about with Alfric: but a moment later, his reverie was broken by a realisation. The men clustered around Godric and Baron Malet had little attention for anything else, so he was perfectly free to watch them uninterrupted. But he was being watched himself.

It was the boy from before, the Saxon boy who had inexplicably come with the Norman men – the one who had sworn the oath in English. He was leaning against the courtyard wall, quite apart from the rest of the Baron’s men. It was no wonder Edmund had missed him. He was thin, so thin he was barely there, and he stood perfectly still. He was peering at Edmund unconcernedly from under an unruly mass of dark hair. Edmund looked at him and for a moment their eyes met. _I know you’re watching me_ , Edmund thought, and he was prepared to hold the stare, to see who would blink first – but their gaze was broken by the grooms bringing the horses out and a clamour coming from the knots of men around Godric and Baron Malet.

Godric gestured at the white stallion the Baron had ridden in yesterday. “A powerful beast,” Godric said. His voice was booming at the best of times, but this was loud even for him. Edmund did his best to think as Alfric would, and realised this was deliberate: these words were designed to carry, to tell any onlooker that Godric was here. He was speaking in English, and Edmund thought this must be deliberate, too. “Must have cost you a pretty penny at market.”

“He would have,” said the Baron coolly. Unlike Godric, he spoke quietly, barely raising his voice – and yet Edmund could hear him just as well. Had he cast some spell upon himself? “But his sires have been in my family for generations. Of course, horses of Normandy are particularly fine, I think you will find.”

“Well, perhaps we can settle that on the field today,” Godric boomed. A stable hand had brought him Wiglaf, his magnificent dappled charger, and he patted the beast’s flank affectionately. “A ten tine stag, you say? You’ve really seen a beast so fine so early in the year?”

“Two of them,” said Baron Malet, gesturing for one of his attendants to bring the mounting block. He barely interacted with the people of Hogwarts, Edmund noticed, not even the servants – not if he could have his own men do something for him instead. “Unusual, I know. But I had a vision, my Lord Godric – two great stags, full and in their prime, clashing their antlers by the shore of the black lake.” He laughed, a chill sound without humour. “One for each of us.”

“Would that we were all gifted with the sight as you are,” said Godric, with a smile. Edmund felt he had seen enough smiles from Godric to know this was fake: the grin was too wide, the eyes too empty. “I did not mean to cast any doubt, I assure you.” There was something unfamiliar in his tone, something that Edmund didn’t like. “Can you divine anything of where the dogs may catch the scent?”

“By the lake,” the Baron said, each syllable curt and alien. Edmund, losing interest, looked past him, trying to see the English boy again. Was he also going to be on the hunt? All the rest of the Baron’s men seemed to be accompanying him, so he supposed that he must too. But then again, all the rest of the Baron’s men had been standing with him, laughing, posturing before Godric. This boy stood apart from them, watching. _Just like you then_ , thought Edmund. _If you’re saying he doesn’t belong here, what does that mean about you_?

He shook his head, doing his best to squash that thought before it could get too far. He couldn’t see the English-speaking boy, no matter where he looked in the courtyard. Perhaps he wasn’t coming after all.

“Edmund,” said a voice, and Carwyn was at his side, touching him lightly on the arm. “Glad to see you came. Your first hunt?” He holding a bow, and it felt strange to see a weapon in his fine hands.

“It is,” said Edmund, wondering yet again at the wisdom of being here at all.

“Well, look excited for it!” The man said, clapping him on the back. “Godric and the Baron, will be doing the hard work of getting the kill: you and I simply get to ride with the dogs and join in the chase.”

“Well, I-“ Edmund began, unsure of how best to admit that he could barely ride a horse. He took a deep breath. Best to be direct, go straight for it. He could trust Carwyn, surely. “I don’t ride well,” he said.

“Is that all?” Carwyn said, a smile playing across his lips.

“Yes!” said Edmund, unsure it was so small a burden to bear. “I can only just stay up in the saddle, I can’t get the horse to go where I tell it to, and if we’re in a chase, what if the horse bolts? What if it throws me?”

“No need to worry,” Carwyn said, standing confident and self-assured. Even the Baron’s arrival and Godric’s strange acquiescence to him elicited nothing more than a raised eyebrow and an offhand remark from Carywyn, and Edmund wished he could bear these troubles like he did. “Here’s what we’ll do,” said Carwyn, lazily handing him the bow. Edmund took it from him almost without thinking. The polished curve of the wood felt beautiful in his hands, and he thought of Godric’s sword yesterday. But there was something different, and where yesterday he’d held the sword with awe, he was itching to hand the bow back to Carwyn. “You can take Hornbeam,” Carwyn continued, unaware of Edmund’s internal dilemma. “She’s very calm and a little advanced in years, to tell you the truth. She may not take you to the front of the chase, but she should be relaxed enough for even you to handle.”

“No, I-“ Edmund began, but Carwyn waved him off.

“No, I insist. If you still need a little reassurance, we’ll cast a calming spell over her.”

“I’m sure we won’t need that,” said Edmund, abashed. He didn’t want Carwyn to think he was a helpless child – yet all the same he could not begrudge him the extra help.

“It’ll do her good to have someone treat her more gentle than I,” said Carwyn with a knowing smile. “You’d be doing me a favour, Edmund, I promise.”

“But what will you ride?” 

Carwyn gave him a wild smile. “Oh, I’ll find someone. Iain over there,” he said, waving vaguely in the direction of the stablemaster, “was just telling me of a young colt, fiery, in need of a firm hand…”

“I couldn’t possibly leave you with a more difficult horse,” Edmund said lamely. “Really, you don’t need to-“

“Edmund, please,” said Carwyn. “I’ve been looking for an excuse to ride this beast for an age. You wouldn’t take that away from me, would you?” Edmund looked at him gratefully and began trying to thank him, but before he could say another word, Carwyn breezed past him. “Excellent!” He said, already headed to Iain. “You have my thanks.”

“Wait!” Edmund called, holding the bow back out for Carwyn to take.

“I’d quite forgotten,” said Carwyn, with a smile, taking the bow back and immediately leaving Edmund feeling lighter. “Unless you’d care to keep it?” He continued with a smile, unaware of the uneasy lurch Edmund’s stomach gave at the prospect.

“No, I shouldn’t-“

“Are you sure? Your first hunt, you may want it. I know that you won’t be up at the front, but you never know...”

Edmund swallowed. The bow was lighter than Godric’s sword, easier to hold, so why did he dislike it so much? With the sword in hand, the Danes and the Normans he’d been striking down with it were purely imaginary: perhaps it did not help that, if he had a bow, there was a good chance he would be using it to kill imminently. He had no qualms about killing an animal, of course: he had helped Granny slit the pigs throats when the time came, and he and Osbert had hunted plenty of hares in the woods. But Edmund thought of the stags the Baron had seen, antlers clashing, and these were no overfatted pig or hare. “The quarry is Godric’s,” he said to Carwyn, trying his best to smile and holding his hands up to refuse the bow. He dropped his voice. “And if one of his men needs to step in to take it and to prevent the Baron from making a kill,” Carwyn raised an eyebrow, but smiled at him, “it would do a lot better in your hands than mine.”

“Well said!” Carwyn replied, no longer proferring the bow, and Edmund felt able to exhale. The thought of riding out on horseback, weapon in hand, to fight and kill for glory, had been all he had once been a dream so powerful it had consumed all of his waking hours. He thought back to Northumbria, to long summer days with Osbert dreaming of taking up arms to serve the King. But now he had a war in front of him. Two wars. He could fight to the death against the hunt’s quarry, one side armed with dogs, bow and arrow, the other with hoof and antler. He could fight against the Baron and the Normans in Godric’s war of words, ideas and impressions. And when he faced both wars, he felt ill at ease, unprepared, and unwilling. _Well, Osbert_ , he thought bitterly, _some Huskarls we turned out to be_. _At least you must have fallen in battle, but I-_ He stopped abruptly. That had been a bad road to turn down. This was why he didn’t think about Osbert, about Northumbria, about his life before Hogwarts. 

Carwyn must have sensed some of Edmund’s discontent, because he looked at him. Not with a smile: for once, there was no trace of irony around those crinkled eyes. “Hey,” he said. “Chin up.” Edmund nodded mutely. “You’re here for your first hunt,” said Carwyn with uncharacteristic gentleness. “And you’re here for Godric. And I know you’ll do him and yourself proud. You’ll have your day to lead the pack in time, I promise.” Edmund looked down, glad that Carwyn had misunderstood him. He knew what he _should_ be doing, what he should want: he had to keep his unease a secret. “But today, I’ll be beside you the entire way if you need me to, Edmund. Gryffindor’s men stick together.”

***

Gryffindor’s men stuck together, it turned out, for perhaps the first half-hour of the hunt. Carwyn really had done his best: he stuck within eyesight of Edmund, shouting words of encouragement and gentle corrections to his posture in the saddle as the hounds bayed and yipped up ahead. But it couldn’t last. Edmund was saddlesore, and no matter what he did it felt like each tug of the reigns, each digging in of his heels, became less of an order and more of a suggestion as Hornbeam began to tire. Edmund couldn’t blame her: when it came down to it, it felt as though neither of them wanted to be there.

As Edmund fell further back, Carwyn had surged forward: his horse was hotblooded, eager to be in the fight, and Edmund suspected that despite what he had said, Carwyn felt the same. He certainly seemed in no hurry to double back and check on Edmund. The last Edmund had seen of him, he had been what felt like miles ahead, riding in spirited pursuit of the quarry and exchanging pleasantries with the thin woman he had been complaining with at the baron’s arrival yesterday.

The only person Edmund had to talk to was Hornbeam, and she was not making the most cooperative company. He knew he should be upset about her lagging behind, should be trying desperately to spur her on: but the cacophony of the hunt began to fade away. Soon, the thunder of galloping hoofbeats and the skysplitting call of Godric’s horn began to be fainter, distant sounds, replaced with birdsong, with the lap of the waves against the shores of the black lake. After days of frantic preparation for Baron Malet’s arrival at Hogwarts, after the steady rhythm of mass, the scriptorium, practicing spells, tending the gardens, prayer, song and spell, there was something calming in the quiet. He had no need to worry about the hunt here, about either of the wars being waged within the hunting party.

Edmund directed Hornbeam to come to a stop by the shores of the lake, and to his surprise, she did as he said. He leant forward against the saddle, taking in air unmarred by fire smoke, incense, ink, vellum, and the close proximities of every witch at Hogwarts. Hornbeam lowered her neck to the water and started drinking loudly, which only slightly broke the stillness. Edmund felt as though he were breathing out at last, breathing out after holding his breath for far too long.

Behind him, he heard hoofbeats: not the gallop of the hunt, but someone coming slowly his way. He supposed Carwyn had finally come to find him, and felt a tug at his heart – he would have to return to the hunt and be back in the fray now, and keep a smile on his face the entire time. He stayed facing the water just a moment longer, his eyes still closed, keeping and treasuring this moment of his own before it could be snatched away from him. But the hoofbeats came ever closer, and he knew that slowly, the war was reaching his little slice of paradise. Edmund opened his eyes and turned around. When he did, he didn’t find Carwyn. Instead, the boy who had come with the Baron, the one who spoke perfect English, was looking at him with that same even, curious stare.

Edmund blinked. The boy was still there. “I’m so sorry,” he said. Now Edmund was closer and without the hubbub of the great hall he could detect the faintest hint of that same strange accent the Baron had, and his stomach dropped. “I didn’t mean to intrude,” the boy said.

Edmund sighed. Like it or not, Godric’s war had come to him.


	9. Into the Viper's Nest

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Content Warning: this chapter deals more heavily with themes of sexual abuse and coercion. Nothing is explicitly shown, but there are some implied scenes. It also portrays flashbacks and characters grappling with the longterm ramifications of trauma.
> 
> In brighter news, though it doesn't reflect things that happen this chapter, I've decided it's finally time to update the story's tags and relationship tags to include some things that are coming.

When Matilde had first set off on her journey, she had hoped that her time being Robert might be a brief one. She had hoped to be able to use him to pass through the North, and leave him dangling like a torn banner at the border to Scotland, or at the gates to Hogwarts at the very least. She wanted very much to go to the castle as herself. To be an outcast from the world she knew was one thing, but it was something else entirely to do it from behind a stranger’s eyes.

But after she had left Edyth, she had gone to Hereward at Nottingham, who had pointed her to Ailred just outside Lincoln. It was when she met Ailred, a thin, birdlike woman who was scarcely a few years older than Matilde herself, that the witch pulled Matilde aside as she arrived.

“There’s another witch here just now,” she said, with a look of caution in her eyes. “A nobleman. If you want to come by tomorrow, if you’d rather not meet him, I’d understand.”

Matilde had considered. She hadn’t known that one could be both a nobleman _and_ a witch – there was something about the craft she had learned with Edyth, her place within the life of the village and the natural order of the world, that felt as though witchcraft were the opposite of nobility entirely. But the prospect of having someone to travel with, a man of wealth and power, was reassuring: even as Robert, her safety on the road would not be guaranteed. Even if he would not be her first choice in companion, meeting and accompanying this nobleman might be a wise choice.

“I’ll take my chances,” Matilde said. Ailred hadn’t said anything, but there was something about the way she looked at Matilde that made her think that her disguise may not be as watertight as she had hoped.

Ailred had raised an eyebrow, but nodded. “Whatever you think is best,” she said, and lead Matilde through into her cottage. In the weeks to come, Matilde would often wonder if she should have paid more attention to Ailred’s face then. But at that moment, Matilde had stepped inside the door, but it was Robert setting his foot on the strewn straw of the floor and meeting Baron Malet and his retinue. And from that point on, Matilde had had plenty of time to get to know Robert, to really practice seeing through his eyes and living in his skin – because it did not take long to decide that the Baron would never, ever meet Matilde.

He was polite enough to Robert, although not particularly interested. This was a relief: he was certainly not paying enough attention to see through her disguise. He was travelling with a large group of men to Hogwarts, perhaps two dozen. A scant few of them had magic, but for the most part, they seemed to be groomsmen, servants, guards and companions, there to keep the Baron entertained and in a style he was accustomed to rather than to learn themselves. He travelled with no women at all. One more body, one more mouth to feed, seemed to matter very little to him – and once he had agreed to take her on, he seemed to pay little attention to her. It did not take Matilde long to notice that he travelled with no women whatsoever, but that was not the reason for her hesitance. 

She didn’t see anything. Not exactly. Nothing had _happened_ while she was there. But as the Baron had been luxuriating in Ailred’s cottage, drinking her best wine and eating her best salt pork, the nervous mistress of the house had been waiting at his right hand, and there had been a moment. No one had said anything, but his hand had lingered against her skin for just a moment too long, and suddenly Matilde _knew_. She was at the corner of the room, any conversation between Ailred and the Baron drowned out by the chatter of some of the Baron’s men, but she did not need to hear the exact words the Baron said to recognize the look in his eyes. There was hunger in them, something cold and desperate and dreadful. She’d seen eyes like that before, in the church. She’d seen that hunger then. She found herself wishing that the light would die from these eyes just as quickly.

She wanted to leave. She wanted to get away from this terrible man and not to see him again, not ever. She could slip out of the door right now: it would be easy. Maybe she would be able to find the next stopping house by herself, or she could sleep in a field, in a ditch, and come back after the Baron had left and ask Ailred.

 _And then what?_ Asked a horrible, practical little voice in her head. _Eventually, you will get to Hogwarts, and he and his men will be there. And what will they think of the boy who ran from them_? And when she did not have an answer, the voice continued. _He is a terrible man,_ the voice said, _but he travels with an armed guard. You will be safe if you travel with him. What other options do you have_?

She hated the little voice, but it was not wrong. She gritted her teeth, looked away from Ailred, and cursed herself for doing it.

There were plenty of stops along the road where the Baron would ask the right questions, would make the right requests, and would somehow contrive to spend a little time alone with the lady of the house. Matilde did not know what happened there, not exactly. If she saw them again that night, the Baron would seem satisfied, his smile wide and his laugh easy. The woman he had spent time with never seemed quite so carefree. There was never any reaction from his travelling companions: perhaps they saw nothing, understood nothing. Perhaps they simply did not care. But while Robert did his best to be one of them, to laugh at the same jokes and care as little, Matilde would find her hand slipping into her pouch. There, she would find herself gripping onto the engraved knucklebones tight enough that her fingers began to ache from their imprint, as if that would do anything. No matter what spells she cast to soothe herself before sleep that night, she knew that she would have terrible, dark dreams.

Baron Malet’s men were polite enough, and might share their water with her, or a little food, though she noted that they took care to keep the best for themselves. But while they were happy to talk among themselves late into the night and to swap war stories as they travelled along the road, they had little to say to the scrawny orphan boy, the one who would thrash and scream in his sleep and who had never ridden a horse before. The Baron’s party had horses aplenty. Matilde could not understand why they were bringing them at first: they did not gallop, and those who were mounted seemed to ride at the same, slow, plodding trudge that had become the very rhythm of her everyday existence. But she quickly changed her tune once Oliver, one of the Baron’s armed men, had impatiently agreed to show Robert the basics of riding a horse. “God knows there’s nothing else to do,” he’d spat, before making a quiet comment to a friend that he did not think she could hear. “If nothing else, watching the runt fall down might be a bit of a laugh.”

Matilde had not fallen down. She felt very tall, suddenly, and as she loomed high above those walking she felt powerful. As the creature continued walking, she realized how sore her legs had been, and suddenly understood the appeal of having someone else to do all of your walking for you. Of course, she had not the faintest idea how to ride a horse, but Edyth had taught her a few tricks for soothing a panicked animal in a birth or when the time came for slaughter. It was easy enough to apply them here. If she wished to direct the horse, she would reach out with her mind and find the horse’s consciousness. Their minds felt strange, a tiny, taut ball of stress and barely-suppressed panic – instead of fussing with reins, spurs, or words, she would far rather simply reach out and gently nudge the horse’s desire to go a particular way, soothe it or spur it onwards. 

Before long, the Baron’s men called Robert a natural, and Matilde had to hurriedly stage a few more ‘falls’ from her mount. The less exceptional, the less noticeable she was, the more she could hope to slip away from the Baron and his men once she had got to Hogwarts. This was what she’d told herself as the party had traversed the length of England and beyond. Hogwarts was more than just her destination now – it was her absolute last hope.

Once the party reached Hogwarts, the Baron’s men would stick by him, but Robert had no need to stay so close. Matilde would lie awake at night, the knucklebones gripped tight in her hands, and think through everything she knew about Hogwarts. She would go over each and every word of Edyth’s she remembered about the school, wishing her own memory was not growing faint as the days slipped by. It was a community, she reassured herself. Godric had been bringing witches here from throughout England for years, and there were other founders still to bring witches to the school. It would be a busy place, thriving – there would be so many faces there, so many people striving to learn and understand magic, that she might barely see the Baron at all. She could live there for some years, grow wiser in the ways of magic, and come back to Edyth. Maybe she would even learn enough of Hogwarts’s strange, foreign magic, that she would be able to teach the old woman a thing or two, to impress her. Even if the magic she learnt at Hogwarts were completely wrong, dead and far inferior, she would take any kind of magic over her travels with the Baron.

He was a witch, Ailred had said so. He _must_ be a witch, to be going to Hogwarts – although who had told him about it was a mystery to Matilde. And yet she had never seen him cast a single spell, nor do even the slightest bit of magic. He did not seem interested in it: he was interested in swift horses, in hunting game, making war, and of course, far too interested in women. Sometimes, the men would talk of the Baron’s visions, of him seeing things, telling the future – but seemed entirely disinterested in doing anything like that as they travelled North, and Matilde was glad. Magic was something special, something _hers_ , and the fewer things of her own she had to share with Baron Malet the better.

By the time they were in Scotland, Matilde had lost track of the days. The endless rhythm of waking, walking, riding, eating (precious little), and falling into an exhausted sleep made each individual day blur together. Her sense of the seasons began to falter – spring should be marching onwards. The trees should be donning new green leaves and the wildflowers around Edyth’s cottage should be just beginning to bloom. But the further she went from home, the more it seemed the year had rolled back a little earlier, and it felt like she was stepping into the hollow ends of Winter, not the joyous burst of new life of Spring. She was sure it had been more than a few weeks, but had it been a month? Some days it felt like the road was her whole life and she had been born as Robert.

She had expected a monastery, a few low buildings – perhaps surrounded by gardens of herbs like Edyth’s. But what she had found as Hogwarts had peeked around the corner of yet another bend in the road was undoubtedly a fortress. They had left the country a long time ago now – one week? Two? – but they might have been back in England, and King Guillame’s newly conquered lands. There were the same stone walls atop a hill, the same squat round towers, the same newly cut stone that looked as though the years and the elements had barely had a chance to touch it. What kind of monastery, thought Matilde, what place of learning, has a portcullis? A drawbridge? But the Baron and his men had let out a great whoop, and Baron Malet had halted the party, sending more riders ahead and taking the time to change into his most imposing armour. If this school was truly a castle, the Baron seemed determined to put it under siege, to ride in a conquering hero. Matilde sat a little away from the frantic stirring of men whose goal was on the horizon. No one had given her anything to do, and she would just as soon not ask for anything. Whatever this place looked like, it must be Hogwarts. They had arrived.

The courtyard was a crowded, confusing mess. Lines of stern-faced witches of all ages stood, staring at the Baron and his company with varying degrees of hostility. Men and women whispered behind their hands, their eyes flitting from one Norman to another, and Matilde had to resist an urge to make herself invisible again and disappear from scrutiny. The witches were clad in simple clothes – not a monk or nun’s habit, but simple, unremarkable garments. The only notable thing was that most of them, at their belt, seemed to have a long, thin leather pouch, like a tiny scabbard from which no dagger emerged. But at the front of the lines were four people far more elegantly dressed than the others. A short, woman with smiling, kind eyes and a flowing dress of yellow so bright it made Matilde almost gasp. A huge man with broad shoulders and hair like a flame caught in the wind, dressed in a gleaming coat of mail and an ornate helmet as though knowing the Baron’s plan and dressing to match. A tall, elegant woman in a deep blue cloth embroidered with delicate silver thread, wearing a thin circlet of metal across her brow and the calm assurance of a queen. And the last of them, a stooped man, impossibly old, wrapped in strange black rags with an occasional flash of emerald brilliance within them.

There was constant overlapping speech, all in Latin, and Matilde felt dread begin to creep across her. She spoke not a word of Latin, not a word of any Scottish tongue. She’d assumed that her English would allow her to get by even if her Norman did not. With whispered entreaties to Oliver, she had been able to get a rough, begrudging translation of what was happening. They were to serve under one of the four masters. The Baron was wearing an odd hat – a _talking_ hat, she realised with a jolt – as a part of some strange Hogwarts tradition. And he would serve – they would all serve – under…

She looked up again at the last man, a withered skeleton barely wrapped in flesh, and mouthed a gentle “no” that she could not voice. Before she left, Edyth had told Matilde that there was no magic that could bring back the dead. But there was something about the taut skin stretched across Salazar’s skull and the wheezing rattle of his voice that left Matilde unsure Edyth had been right.

Time was moving strangely. Before she knew it, they were at the feast, floating candles and enchanted stars burning above her. Not eating and drinking, not yet, but waiting in a line to swear an oath of allegiance. Matilde wondered in a nervous haze whether an oath was binding, was _truly_ her word, if Robert swore it, and not her. Perhaps she did not _really_ have to swear herself to this man. But the line of the Baron’s men before her grew shorter and shorter, and Matilde burned with shame, with fear, with guilt. She could not swear her oath in Latin. Oliver was already gone, sat at a long table with his new fellows – she was not sure he would have translated for her anyway, not here and in front of everyone. She thought about hiding and making herself invisible by magic. But this was not Lord Jean’s hall: countless witches watched her, and she wondered for a sick moment if they would simply see through any magical disguise she wore.

Matilde could have sworn there were three or four people in line ahead of her, but before she knew it, she was at the front, watching a burly Norman man whose name she had never learned finishing those last few words in Latin. She swallowed, her mouth suddenly dry; he was already gone, and Salazar was beckoning her. She came to him and kneeled, and looked up hesitantly, wondering what to say – but as she met his eyes, she instantly winced and looked away. She had a terrible feeling, new but horribly familiar. She was used to reaching out with her mind, to finding the mind of another creature – always another creature, never a person – and touching it. Suddenly, she understood how it was to be that creature. She felt some kind of _presence_ , alien, wrong, pushing against her consciousness. In disgust, she looked away, screwed her eyes shut, trying to find out how to close her own mind up. She wanted to scream, but not now, not here, with everyone watching her.

The touch upon her mind stopped, but whether she had successfully shut it out or if Salazar had simply stopped was unclear. She opened her eyes, but could not bring herself to look up at him. She couldn’t see those eyes again. There was no warmth behind them, no light, only a kind of strange fascination like she might have had watching a line of marching ants.

“So, no Latin for you, I see,” Salazar said. In English. He had been inside her head, he must have _been_. It was not possible to touch another person’s mind and even begin to understand it: that was what Matilde had always taught. Matilde could never even begin to make sense of the complicated knot of language, emotion, want, need and sheer complicated _being_ that another person contained – but Salazar must be able to. She didn’t know how this worked, not at all, and she had a horrible realisation: _I don’t know how much he knows_. He might know everything: Giselbert, Matilde, Robert, _everything_ , and she had no way of knowing at all. Not until he said something.

Matilde did not trust herself to look up, even to move in the slightest, to say anything at all. But she needed _something_ to look at: so much felt unreal that she needed some anchor to hold her down in case she simply blew away. She found her eyes resting on Salazar’s hand, gripping some kind of staff, his swollen, bony knuckles locked around wood worn smooth with age. “Luckily, there are many languages I speak,” he continued, a trace of amusement in his voice, “even if Norman is not one of them. I will speak the words of the oath of allegiance, and you, Robert…” and Salazar hesitated for just a fraction of a second after ‘Robert’, just short enough to be an accident, just long enough to be deliberate, “will repeat them after me.”

Matilde was distracted. By that pause, and what it could mean, but she had also seen something out of the corner of one eye, some flicker of movement. Nevertheless, she managed to answer with a “yes.”

“By the Lord and all that is holy, I pledge myself to…” Salazar began, and Matilde’s words followed his. She was barely listening to the words that she said, hardly knowing what it was she swore. Did that matter? Did any of this matter? Giselbert had been the one who had started her on the long road that had lead her to Hogwarts, Giselbert and his desire for her to be his ‘helpmeet’. But now she was at Hogwarts, stuck in some kind of service under the Baron, swearing her loyalty to Salazar… it seemed as though she had simply traded one bad master for two.

“… love all that he loves, shun all that he shuns…” she repeated. _What does a man like Slytherin love_? She thought. _Is he even capable of that? Is he_ \- her train of thought was interrupted again by that flicker of movement again, just visible. With a horrible jolt, she realised something was darting out of Salazar’s billowing sleeve: the tiny head of a snake, jagged black lines coiling down its body, looking out curiously with one beady eye. For a second, its forked tongue darted out, as if tasting the air, before slipping back into its jaws. An adder? Why did Salazar have an adder? What if this was some kind of test?

“-According to God’s law, and according to the world's principles,” Salazar said, waiting for her reply. The snake moved its head back and forth, as if tasting the air of freedom, and Matilde swallowed.

“According to God’s law,” she said, her voice wavering only a little. _If this is a test, I will not back down_ , she thought, “and according to the world’s principles.”

“I will never do anything-“ Salazar began, and then abruptly stopped. 

“I will never do anything,” Matilde began, but Salazar had fallen silent. She dared to look upwards, and he was staring at the adder. His cold eyes looked dispassionately at the creature, with no real surprise, and for a moment Matilde was seized with the absurdity of everything and nearly had to suppress a laugh. But then Salazar began to speak again, but not in English. Not even in Latin. He was letting out a low, urgent hissing, a hissing that for all the world sounded like the snake itself. If Matilde had not seen his face, watched his lips move, she would have thought it was the adder. The snake seemed to pause to listen, and then simply slid back inside the sleeve. Salazar gave a slight smile, and Matilde stared.

It was one thing to understand an animal, to touch upon its mind and to make it do something. Salazar had not done that. He had simply spoken to the snake, and the snake had listened and it had understood.

“-loathful to him,” Salazar continued as if nothing had happened at all. He still had a slight smirk, and Matilde decided all she could do was grit her teeth and continue. “whether by will or by force…”

Matilde continued to echo Salazar’s words, but she was driven by a new determination. She would not back down, would not be intimidated. It was not as if she had never been here before.

She spoke no Latin, and seemed to have little chance of finding friendship at Hogwarts. The Baron terrified her, and his men had not welcomed her. If she tried to look elsewhere for companionship, it was clear that there would be little welcome for her among Godric’s men, too – they were Saxons, and she was Norman. Salazar had seen into her mind, might even know her secret, could even command this viper… she shuddered. She was, in short, twelve years old again, neither Norman or Saxon, left on the fringes and ruled over by incomprehensible men and with more power than she could imagine. But, just as it had been when she was twelve years old, all Matilde had to do was get through these next few years. Just a few more years, and she could be apprenticed to Edyth, and all would be well: the difference was that this time, she knew there was a light creeping over the horizon.

***

She finished the oath, gripped the staff, kissed the wizened lips of Salazar and managed it without wincing. The feast passed in a blur of noise, of other people’s drunkenness and the light, delicate notes of harp music. Salazar seemed to slip away some time when the festivities were at their height, and Matilde did not see him again that night. Nor was he anywhere to be found the next morning when she awoke in the strange dormitory, surrounded by the Baron’s men and a multitude of other faces she did not recognize. She might want to find out more about Salazar, to understand him, to learn the strange magics he practised and how to resist them: but on this, her first morning in this strange new place, she could perhaps do without his company. She found herself torn between relief at his absence and a horrible, creeping fear that at any moment he might appear around any corner, be waiting in an open doorway, and her mind would feel that strange, terrible pressure upon it once again. So when the Baron’s men began speaking of a hunt, a grand hunt that Baron Malet had arranged with Godric Gryffindor, she felt a little relieved. That there was some deep tension between Godric and Salazar had not escaped her notice at the feast last night: if she was with Gryffindor there was no way Salazar could arrive.

Outside of an excuse to escape the castle that had been her new home for scarcely a day, Matilde had no interest in hunting. Sometimes, creatures had to be lead along the path to death – this was perfectly normal, and something she held no qualms about. But she saw no reason why it should be made into a _game_. There had been plenty of people in her village who had managed to quietly poach a deer from Lord Jean’s woods when they needed one, and none of them had needed packs of dogs, troops of men, or any of the elegant pageantry that she found surrounding her as she made her way out to the courtyard with the Baron’s men.

But however Matilde might feel about hunting, she was sure that Robert probably loved to hunt. Hunting – and men themselves, for that matter – seemed to have so many rules she never learned, so many elaborate customs, but she gathered that she would have to do little with the main hunt and chase. For those as far down the social ladder as Robert, it seemed that the true purpose of the hunt was simply to be there, and to be seen to be there. Not that anyone was interested in seeing Robert. He may had have been invited, but once the Normans were preparing for the hunt it became abundantly clear that he was an afterthought. Robert was so unimportant, so invisible to everyone else that for a moment in the courtyard Matilde had wondered if she had cast a spell she had somehow forgotten; it was clear that in all the excitement and calculations of a day like this, the scrawny orphan the Baron had found on the road simply did not figure into anything much. She simply stood at the edge of the courtyard, watching the two groups of witches circle each other, hackles raised like two village cats fighting over territory. She had been interested to note that she was not the only one standing on the fringes, barely a part of the hunting party. A boy – _another_ boy, she corrected herself, for Robert would surely not think of him as anything else – was standing on the edges, looking nervously at Godric’s group of hunters as if unsure whether he was truly a part of them. He caught her eye, saw her watching, and she realized she was in uncertain waters. Would Robert be watching like this? She had taken her invisibility in this moment for granted, and now she was caught. She decided the only thing for it was to keep looking, to not back down – but she was glad a moment later when the commotion of the hunt preparation had meant a group of servants moved between them and broke their eye contact.

The hunt began, and losing the pack of hunters was the work of a moment. She rode along the shore of the lake and thought about Hogwarts, about Baron Malet, about Salazar. Finally, aching and unbidden, she thought of Edyth, and of home. Everything at Hogwarts was so complicated, so wrapped in ritual and ceremony. Everything here seemed tainted by the shadow of Salazar, looming on high like the mountains hugging the horizon. Back with Edyth, magic had been useful, had occasionally been fun, and had always been hard work; but her life there had never been uncertain, never been terrifying. _Of course_ , she thought to herself, _that was true right up until Giselbert came at you in the church. Until-_

Her memories of Giselbert lurked close to the surface like a great fish in murky water, and the moment they sensed anything to feed on they could surface without warning, looming out of the deep. It was all there, all in front of her and so _real_ : Giselbert’s hand on her skin, her crashing outreach of magic, the man falling back, the priest dead on the floor. She tried to calm herself, but it was too late. She recovered quickly enough from her own moment of panic, but the borrowed horse she rode sensed it. Their minds were brushing against each other, two strange countries uneasily sharing a border, and the horse took flight, whinnying in distress as it galloped along the lake shore. She managed to hang on, but barely, her knuckles whitening as she gripped onto the beast’s mane. She wished she were holding the reins now, that she knew how to use them, how to slow the runaway horse by conventional means: but there was no chance of her grabbing them now when they were running at such speed. Her only hope was to reach out, to calm the horse and convince it any danger was past. Its mind was jagged, made alien with terror, but if she could just find the right point to press on, the right crack to slip in the knife of her magic…

Matilde felt her mind stumble, slide around on the horse’s like she was slipping on ice. She gritted her teeth, trying hard to stay upright as her mount thrashed around, nearly throwing her. She wanted desperately to try a spell to keep herself bound to the saddle, to stop herself being thrown from the horse and killed, but she knew there was no way she would be able to focus on that and on calming the creature at the same time. The horse let out another panicked whinny, barrelling onwards, and Matilde knew that there was nothing for it but to screw her eyes tightly shut and reach out again one more time, trying as hard as she could to stay calm, stay focused, and cast the spell _just_ right…

She found the spot and the horse calmed so quickly, and stopped so abruptly, that Matilde was nearly thrown from its back entirely. She righted herself, and directed the horse – as gently as she could – to walk on. Her heart was pounding in her chest, beating out a rhythm she no longer needed as the mad dash had finished.

The idea to come to Hogwarts had been a wild triumph for Matilde. Weeks of travel, endless nights of fretting about her identity being discovered: it had all lead to this, this place where she could study magic openly, could live out the next few years before she was able to return to Edyth. This was supposed to be a time of victory, she reflected ruefully. But instead, she simply wanted to take this horse, to speak directly into its mind, and to ride toward the horizon. Idly, she waved a hand and raised a pebble from the beach along the shore of the lake, throwing from horseback and attempting to skim the stone across the surface. She thought she had a good angle, but the stone merely sank beneath the dark waters. She sighed.

Away from her, she heard the calls of the hunt. They seemed to be picking up speed: the quarry had been sighted. Matilde’s mind found the mind of her horse, gently suggesting to it that she wanted to keep moving in much the same way she had before, slowly moving further away from the hunt. And suddenly, as she continued along the shoreline, the trees of the forest that hugged the shores of the black lake gave way, revealing another horse, another rider.

The boy from the courtyard. The boy sat astride his horse, awkward in the saddle and looking out over the lake much as Matilde had been moments before. The boy turned, looking at her with wide, panicked eyes as though he were the deer and Robert were the hunt.

“I’m sorry,” Robert said. Matilde had decided that English seemed like her only chance to be understood. “I didn’t mean to intrude.”


	10. The Dam Breaks

The boy stared at her, and there was a heavy silence. He opened his mouth and seemed about to say something, but left it hanging open and silent. Far away, a great cheer went out: perhaps one of the hunters’ arrows had found its mark. Just when Matilde thought that her new companion would never speak, he swallowed and said, “Are you a Norman?”

_Charming,_ thought Matilde. _Any hopes of gaining an ally here are clearly long gone if he can’t even manage basic introductions_. For one wild moment, she was tempted to lie, to say she was a Saxon, that she was half Saxon. “I am,” she said after a moment’s pause, reluctantly resigned to the truth. “Is that going to be a problem?”

She stared this boy down. He was older than her maybe, fair haired, broader across the shoulders. Everything about him – the way he sat in the saddle, his grip on the reins, his uneasy expression – betrayed him as uncomfortable on horseback. But to his credit, he met her gaze head on. He seemed conflicted, but finally, at some great cost to himself, he said. “No. Well… I don’t know. It doesn’t have to be.”

“Good,” Robert said, and the boy looked away first. Matilde felt she’d won. _Is this what being a boy is always like?_ Matilde thought. _All of this posturing?_ “I’m Robert,” she said, still wondering at the strangeness of it on her tongue.

“Edmund.” He looked at Robert as if to size him up, and Matilde hoped that her own nervousness was at least a little harder to read on her face than Edmund’s was. “Why aren’t you at the hunt?” Edmund asked her.

She shrugged, trying to buy time while she wondered how much of the truth to tell. “I don’t care for hunting,” she said – it was true enough. But there was something in Edmund’s face, something in how he’d looked waiting in the courtyard on the edge of the men preparing for the hunt, that made her keep talking. “And I’m none too sure I fit in with the hunters,” she said. Edmund nodded at that, and she decided to turn the question back on him. “How about you?”

“Me neither,” said Edmund, before adding hurriedly “Hunting. I’m not sure I’m any good at it.” He flushed at saying it, and Matilde looked at him with pity: she hadn’t realised another human being could be so obviously uncomfortable.

“Do you not ride well?” She asked, unsure if she was throwing him a lifeline or digging the knife in further.

He shrugged, looking away, before abruptly changing the subject. “If you’re a Norman,” Edmund said, frowning, “why did you swear the oath in English?”

Matilde rolled her eyes. “What does it matter?”

“I’m just curious,” he said. “All of the other men did.”

“Well,” said Matilde, uncomfortable, “the other men spoke Latin. I don’t. And Salazar doesn’t speak Norman.” She detected something in Edmund, some shimmer of disgust, but whether it was at Salazar or at the entire idea of being Norman, she was not sure. A silence settled in, a tense waiting broken only by the gentle grunt of Edmund’s horse. She seemed fidgety: Matilde tried to resist the urge to smile when she saw how uncomfortable her rider was at every tiny movement. She decided to make a peace offering: gently, she reached out with her mind, finding the horse’s mind and soothing it. Within moments, the creature stopped fretting and Edmund seemed a little more relaxed. He was still silent though, and the silence was stretching out further than Matilde could bear. Finally, she found herself saying, “I hate him. I wish I didn’t have to be his apprentice.”

Edmund stared at her, open mouthed. “Salazar?” He asked.

Matilde nodded, eagerly, feeling like she was beginning to lose control over her own tongue. “The way he looks at you...” She was unable to finish, unable to choose the next set of words that would not give her away. Robert should have no secrets to be worried about. 

She looked up at Edmund, worried that she would have lost him, but he was nodding along carefully. For weeks, Matilde had been building a dam slowly across her heart, trying to hold back rivers of anger, of secrets, and of discomfort. But talking to Edmund, having one single sympathetic ear and a few nods of encouragement, was making cracks grow across the dam.

“He can talk to snakes,” she said, trying to divert the conversation. She would have to do her best not to unleash the full flood of all that had happened in one great torrent: she didn’t want to let either of them drown.

“He can _what_?” said Edmund.

She told him what had happened when she swore the oath yesterday, leaving out that pressure against her mind. “It looked up at him like it was listening to him,” she said, “and slithered back into his sleeve. I know a little magic, but I’ve never seen anything like it.”

“It’s ungodly magic,” Edmund said firmly. Matilde was less sure: Giselbert had had more than enough opinions on what counted as against God, and calling something ungodly was not a tool she took any pleasure in wielding.

“The Baron’s no better,” she said, deciding to change topics again and divert the conversation before it could travel that road too long. “Everyone seems to think he’s so grand, everyone here and all his men, but I’ve seen-“

Edmund interrupted, eyeing her curiously. “Are you not one of his men?”

She was glad he had cut in then, had saved her from trying to articulate everything she had seen of him. “Hardly,” she said: she repressed a smile at how she was hardly the Baron’s man in more ways than one. “I travelled here with him, but we didn’t meet until we were on the road.”

He nodded. “I’m sorry, you were saying that you’d seen…”

“I’ve seen a different side of him, that’s all,” she said lamely. It was hard to know exactly how to say what she had seen, because it was Matilde who had seen it. Robert, she was sure, would not have understood what was happening quite as well.

“I don’t understand why everyone is so keen to welcome him,” the boy across from her was saying, and she breathed a sigh of relief to be on safer ground. He seemed more than happy to distrust the Baron even without her going into any specifics. “He’s not truly a noble, not really.”

“What do you mean?”

“He came yesterday with his list of long titles, but they aren’t his,” said Edmund: Matilde sensed that his own dams may have begun to break, that his frustrations were the ones pouring out now. “That seat he holds is on English land. It’s an English title; he stole it.” Matilde shifted uncomfortably, and as if he picked up exactly what she was thinking, he looked directly at her. “You’re a Norman,” he said. He may as well have spat a curse at her.

“I am,” she said. “But I promise, I didn’t…” he was staring at her uncomfortably. “Look, I’m only here because the Lord I served insisted on bringing his whole household over, after the conquest. I wish I’d stayed in Normandy too.”

He seemed to consider this for a moment, and must have decided this was good enough for him. “If you’re a Norman,” he said, “why do you speak English so well? I can barely tell from your voice. No one else in the Baron’s party sounds like you.”

“After I came here,” said Matilde, speaking slowly, trying to work out the exact details of Robert’s story as she’d already begun telling it, “I was raised by a Saxon.” That intrigued Edmund – he was looking at her eagerly, impatient to hear more. But how could she best describe Edyth? She was sure a Norman boy would have had considerably less to do with the midwife. “She was a witch also,” said Matilde, “and taught me as much of her magic as she could. She cared for me, since my parents passed a long time ago.”

“Mine too,” Edmund said, and the boy seemed to thaw suddenly. The two of them shared a look of understanding, unspoken.

“Perhaps we should ride on a little further,” Matilde said. “Just so that if anyone from the hunt sees us, we’re not _too_ far off.”

“Should we?” said Edmund, and a strange fear came over his face. Matilde looked at him, worried he was hiding something terrible. She wished for a second she could be like Salazar, to see into his mind, to understand. But while she could touch the brain of a horse and could ease the pain and maybe even the panic from a human consciousness, it would be something else entirely to peer unbidden into his mind.

But then she had seen the way he sat on the horse, remembered his grip on the reins. She understood exactly what he was thinking, without the need for any magic at all. “You _don’t_ ride well, do you? You can’t really control the horse, right?” 

He looked away from her, frowning. For a long moment, he didn’t say anything, until he suddenly said sullenly, “You won’t tell anyone, will you?”

“Of course not,” said Matilde. She paused, and, trying to keep a smile from her face, asked the question that had been plaguing her. “How were you planning on getting back?”

Edmund shrugged. “I hadn’t exactly planned it. I was told she-“ he indicated the horse with one hand, “would be easy and that I wouldn’t have any trouble.” He sighed heavily. “To be honest, I was enjoying the chance to just get away from the castle for a little while. I know I’ll have to go back eventually.”

“I know how that feels,” said Matilde without thinking.

“To want to get out of Hogwarts?” Said Edmund, eyeing her carefully.

It was Matilde’s turn to shrug. “Not really,” she said. “Well, maybe. I’ve only been there for a day, but I don’t know if I much like it yet. No, I’m thinking of a long time ago, back when I first knew I had magic.” Her tongue was moving almost of its own accord now, with no thought for Robert, and she fought to check her own words before they left her lips. “I was in the hall, and I was waiting at table,” she said, hurriedly checking with herself. Boys served at table too, did they not? Well, if they didn’t, she could always say that _Norman_ boys did- “and everyone had drunk rather too much. It was loud, and there was no air – the fire was burning hot, and the smoke was thick, and someone had aimed a kick at me as I passed for no real reason, and I just wanted to be anywhere else. Anywhere at all. And then…” she drew a breath, and Edmund was looking at her with wonder. Telling this story hurt, and she found herself unexpectedly dealing with the pain of two wounds. There was the pain of that night, the shame, the terror, but there was another layer, too. She was remembering Edyth, asking about her disappearances that very first morning in the old woman’s hut. She missed her terribly.

“Then?” He echoed, bringing her back to the saddle and the lake.

“I was up a tree,” said Matilde. “Half a mile away. I thought I’d gone mad.” She shook her head. “I got back an hour later, and no one even knew I was gone. I kept disappearing after that, kept disappearing until someone noticed I had magic.”

He nodded. “I disappeared too. Not quite like that, but... I wonder sometimes…” His hand strayed to his belt, to the tiny leather scabbard that so many of the witches here seem to carry. “The magic we do then, before we can control it,” he said, “Do you think we’ll ever be able to do that again? To turn invisible? To just disappear from one place, and reappear in another?”

She tried, and failed, to suppress a smile. Could the witches of Hogwarts really not make themselves invisible? She decided not to tell him about that particular trick, just in case she still needed to use it sometime soon. “Even if you could disappear and make your way back to the castle that way,” she said, “the horse would still be here.”

“That’s not what I meant!” He said, indignant.

“I know-“

“Even the four founders couldn’t-”

“Edmund-“

“I know,” he said, still a little touchily. “I’m just saying. The thought that we could do such complicated magic, so young, and without even having a wand…”

“Why would I need a wand?” Said Matilde. She’d seen the witches of Hogwarts carrying them, of course, and casting spells with them, but she’d thought they were purely decorative – an affectation, like their pretence of being a monastery. “I can do magic just fine without one.”

Edmund stopped and stared at her, and Matilde decided to demonstrate. Closing her eyes for a second, she reached out with her mind to find Edmund’s horse’s, and set it moving towards her.

“How.. are you doing that?” Edmund clutched onto the reins, his face in exaggerated mask of terror that made it hard for her not to laugh at him again.

“Oh yes,” she said. “It’s quite easy, really.” She was enjoying the look on his face, and, deciding to show off, reached out to her own horse as well, setting them both trotting along the side of the lake in the general direction the hunt had gone. She let her hands sit by her side, away from the reins. “I just find the horse’s mind, and I tell it what it wants to do.”

“And it _listens_?” Said Edmund, staring at her. “So Salazar can talk to snakes, and you can talk to horses-“

“Well, not exactly,” said Matilde. “I don’t _talk_ to it, it’s not that sort of spell. I just sort of… let the horse know what it wants to do. And it believes you.” She patted her mount affectionately on the mane. “You just have to let it think that this is what it wants to do by itself, you don’t _tell_ it. If you tell the horse, it might decide it disagrees.”

Edmund stared at her. “I still don’t see the difference,” he said.

Matilde sighed. She was struggling to articulate it herself, to explain the sheer _wrongness_ of what she’d seen. “Think of it this way,” she said. “I know a spell – a complicated spell – to let me command a horse, or a dog.” Edmund nodded. “But Salazar…” she reached for the words. “Salazar knows a language of snakes. That’s not a spell you cast, that’s something else, something stranger…” Did the creatures of the earth really have their own tongues, she wondered. Could you really learn to talk to a snake like you would learn English, like you’d learn Norman?

Edmund nodded slowly. “I think I understand,” he said. “That’s something else entirely.” She felt guilty for a moment that she had not said about Salazar looking into her mind, but how could she explain that? Edmund paused, lost in thought. “Why would he even have a snake?” He said. “Even if he can speak to snakes, why does he have one there at the sorting? Do you think there was someone he was trying to poison? Perhaps Godric-“

Matilde shook her head. “No,” she said, “I don’t think so. He wasn’t _worried_ that I’d seen it, and, besides, I think that if Salazar wanted to kill someone, he’d have far easier ways of doing it than that.” As she talked to Edmund, an idea was dawning on her, an idea she didn’t quite understand until she found herself saying the words aloud. “I think…” she said, “I think he _wanted_ me to see it.”

“What do you mean?” asked Edmund. “He was showing you the snake?”

“He was pretending not to,” said Matilde, “but the way he looked at me… it was like he was making sure I’d seen.”

“That he could speak to the snake?”

“That he could command it,” said Matilde. She shuddered. If her other suspicion about Salazar was true, he’d have been able to _tell_ that she’d seen. “I bet if I just asked any of the other Slytherins, they’d have seen the same thing. He wants us to know what he can do. That it’s special.”

“I wish I knew what he was planning,” said Edmund, his weight awkwardly shifting in the saddle. “Wait…” He paused, face screwed up in thought. “A moment ago, when you were talking about…” he held up the useless reigns with one vague gesture, “You called it a spell. How can you cast a spell without a wand? You didn’t even _say_ anything.”

“Some spells need words,” Matilde shrugged, “and some don’t. That’s what I learned.” She looked at the scabbard on Edmund’s belt with interest. “Before I came here, I’d never even seen a wand.” She shrugged, guiding the two horses around either side of a spindly tree that had chosen right by the lake side, of all places, to grow.

“That’s not how it works!” Said Edmund, inflamed. “You can’t just-“

“I think you’ll find I can, actually,” Matilde shrugged. “I’m sure you did some magic long before you first came to Hogwarts and got a wand.”

“That was different,” Edmund frowned, and they rode in silence for a few minutes – she seemed to have lost him to another brooding spell. She couldn’t tell where the hunt was by now, but they were bound to be turning around and heading back to the castle soon, and from here she should be able to see them when they were. She supposed she should ride to meet them when they did, but the thought made her wince a little. She looked over at her travelling companion. Edmund was sat bumping in the saddle. Like a sack of flour, Matilde thought – he should be moving with his steed’s motion, but instead the let each bump jar him as though he had no muscle tone of his own at all. Even with her doing the hard work of moving and directing his horse, he quite simply had no idea how to ride.

He looked over at her, clearly noticing her watching him. It was so strongly reminiscent of the courtyard that for a moment, she was almost there again. He looked at her, frowning. “Could you do that to _me_?” He asked.

“Do what?” Asked Matilde, and then she understood. “Reach into your mind?” He nodded, and for a fleeting moment she felt bad about her decision not to tell him about Salazar’s _other_ power. “God, no,” she said. For a moment, she thought about what you could do with a power like that over another man. Even if Slytherin could reach into her mind and see what was inside, could he really change her wants? What would a man like that _do_ with – she bit her cheek so hard it hurt. No point in thinking of that here. No point in spooking the horses. She hoped Edmund wouldn’t notice her hesitance, and the way the two creatures had started to strain at her control. “Animal minds are easy,” she said, pushing her mind towards the two mounts and calming them again, “especially animals that have been bred to do what they’re told. Horses, dogs are easy, but then goats….” She shrugged. He looked at her as if she’d confessed that draining the lake was a little hard, but she was able to dry up small streams. “Animals just want things,” she said. “It’s not hard to make them want something else. They never stop and think about _why_. But people… I don’t know. The most I can do with people is find pain, and take it away. I can help, but I can’t just make them _do_ something with magic, not like that. And even if I could…” She let the possibility hang in the air, not wanting to think about it any further.

Edmund nodded slowly. “I suppose that makes sense,” he said. “It’s just so strange to me. I’ve never heard magic spoken of like that.”

She shrugged. “Well, there’s plenty I don’t know,” she said. “I can’t even _use_ a wand. All your spells are in Latin, and mine aren’t, they’re in English-“ Edmund peered at her, fascinated but unable to interrupt, “some of them, anyway. There’s some words I don’t recognise, maybe from something else even older. But maybe…” she hesitated momentarily. “Maybe there’s more to magic than your masters at Hogwarts know,” she said with a smile.

Edmund thought for a moment. “I suppose there must be,” he said. “Although maybe…” He shuddered. “Maybe some know more than others. Or more than they say. Maybe being able to understand minds is…”

“What do you mean?” Matilde asked – but she knew what was coming, slowly but surely, and it felt as though ice-water was trickling down the back of her neck.

“Sometimes,” he said, in a conspiratorial tone, “I think that Salazar knows what I’m thinking.” Matilde blinked, and did her best to look interested, surprised. “I don’t know why I think that but maybe… maybe there’s more to that school of magic. That type. Maybe that’s something he knows.”

“Maybe,” said Matilde. _Even now, it was better to say nothing_ , she decided. Robert should be an open book, should have no secrets he was worried that Salazar was looking into his head to bring out.

“Maybe he’ll teach you,” said Edmund, a slight note of bitterness in his voice now, “all of you. All of his strange magic.” He sighed.

“Not likely,” Matilde said. “After the feast he disappeared. I don’t know where he’s even gone.” Silence fell between them for a moment. “If he does,” said Matilde suddenly, with a conviction that surprised even her, “I’ll teach you. All of it.” She gave him a hard look. “Maybe even about telling that horse of yours what to do, and how to ride it. Although not all of that’s magic.”

“Please do,” he said. “Perhaps I can help with your Latin, and with using a wand...” And with those words, Matilde knew that the alliance between them was sealed. She smiled. It had taken years for her to gain a friend in the village, when she had met Edyth. Now she had managed to find one at Hogwarts in days. Perhaps things were looking up.

For a moment, she enjoyed a moment of optimism – but a thought came racing soon to chase it away. “I don’t know if Salazar will teach much that I can tell you about,” she said. “Not to me, at any rate.”

“What do you mean?”

“Do you remember the way Salazar asked about the Baron’s parents?” Asked Matilde. “Like the only _real_ way to get magic is to inherit it like some family crest?”

She shook her head, breathing in for more, but Edmund cut across her. “As if it matters! My parents had no magic at all, and it made no difference to me. What about yours, were they…?”

He left the question hanging, and Matilde shrugged. “My mother probably wasn’t,” she said, “but I don’t really remember her. Maybe she just hid it all her life. But I’m sure if he feels like that, he won’t want to teach _me_.”

“And your father?” Edmund asked, following his quarry like one of Godric’s wolfhounds.

“I don’t know,” said Matilde carefully. “I’ve never met him. I’m not sure if my mother…” she coloured, realising too late that that was Matilde’s answer. There was no reason Robert could not have known his father well, been raised on his knee before the man reached an untimely death in war. _Well_ , she thought, looking across at Edmund, _maybe not at war. This one has no fondness for Norman soldiers, and for good reason._

Edmund nodded sympathetically, and Matilde squinted at him, trying to gauge if that was pity. But all that he said was, “it’s so unfair that you’re all under Slytherin now.”

“I wish I wasn’t,” said Matilde. “I don’t know if Godric would take me, because…” she vaguely gestured around herself, Edmund, the hunt, trying to encapsulate the whole dynamic between Gryffindor and the Baron. “But surely one of the others, the two women…” She shrugged. “I didn’t understand much of what was happening, to be honest. It was all in Latin, and one of the men near me would translate, but he didn’t get everything-”

“Something bad happened,” said Edmund. “I don’t know what, not really. But the four founders used to discuss it all between the four of them, used to divide up who everyone would serve under. That got hard after…” he trailed off, looking out over the lake, “well, you know,” he said, clearly forgetting that Matilde didn’t. She sighed – one more mystery to uncover later. “But it’s how they’ve done it for years. This hat…” He grimaced, adjusting himself in the saddle, “I don’t know. None of us knew until it happened that whoever got the Baron would get to have all of his retinue, but I keep thinking that Slytherin _must_ have known. And then I think about the hat, and, I wonder… what if Slytherin enchanted it somehow? Changed it so that he got all of the new arrivals? The founders said they all put their magics into it, but…” He trailed off helplessly.

“I bet he did,” she said slowly. Of course, she had no idea what was possible, not really. Not where Slytherin was concerned. Oh, she knew a little magic, but that was _Edyth’s_ magic – magic of blood and bone, of pain and calm, magic of the land and the people and the earth. But this Hogwarts magic, this strange land of enchanted buildings and hats that spoke, of Latin and quill and parchment… Even before talking to snakes, and looking into her mind, there was still so much she could not begin to understand. But there were some things she did know. “He’s planning something,” she said, and as she spoke it, she believed that it was true. There was simply too much mystery around Slytherin for her to disregard. “And I’m going to find out what I can.”

Edmund nodded. “Me too.” He looked over at her. “I never would have thought I’d be working with a Norman,” he said, sounding strained.

“I’ve worked with a Saxon before,” said Matilde, trying not to roll her eyes. “I think she managed not to die of shame.” She still missed Edyth fiercely, but she wondered if that sting might lessen a little now she had someone else to work with, to conspire with. Ahead of them, horsemen broke from the treeline of the dark forest further North. The hunt was returning, and in high spirits. Norman and Saxon had clearly managed to work together long enough to catch the two bucks who were levitating lazily six feet above the ground, dead. “Ready to rejoin the hunt?” She asked to Edmund.

“I think so,” he said. “Are you able to help me with…” he glanced back down at the horse, ashamed.

“I won’t let up until we’re in the courtyard, don’t worry,” said Matilde. In truth, holding focus on the two horses at once was just beginning to wear on her. It was a great deal of magic to be doing, complicated magic, and once she was able to stop, she was sure she would do as little else for the day as she could get away with. Perhaps the pious witches of Hogwarts would believe it if she said she wished to spend the rest of the day in silent prayer and meditation. But for a friend – for her first true friend here – it was more than worth it.

Matilde looked over at Edmund, leaning in his saddle at entirely the wrong angle. “You know, you’re not just working with a Norman,” she said teasingly, deciding to try on this friendship for size and see how she liked it, “but a Slytherin too. Do you think you’ll die of shock?”

Edmund seemed to consider her for a moment. She was not sure he had quite got that she was joking. “Not a _true_ Slytherin, though,”” he said with some thought. “You’re helping me find out what he’s doing. You’re not loyal to him, not like I am to Gryffindor.”

“I’m not doing this for Gryffindor either,” said Matilde, a little more sharply than she’d intended. She had no love for Godric and his knot of men with their brooding and posturing. _Then who are you doing it for_? A voice in her head asked. _Easy,_ said another voice. _I’m doing this for Edyth. She’d be so proud that I was delving into the secrets of Hogwarts and its founders._ Aloud, she said, “I’m doing this because it’s the right thing to do.”

“I know,” said Edmund, taken aback. The figures of the hunters were growing ever closer, and Matilde was a little surprised to see Godric and the Baron locked in some kind of conversation. Edmund looked up and seemed to see it too. “I’m in this with you,” he said with a shrug.

“For Godric?”

He shook his head. “I don’t even know anymore.” 


	11. Helena

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I'm back!
> 
> I know it's been a long time - I try to write with a buffer, and the next few chapters have been so difficult to write that they killed any interest I had in writing this fic for entirely too long. But I've finally got them to a place I'm happy with, so I'm able to post this chapter! I'm not sure I'll go back to posting every two weeks, but expect something else in January, I hope.
> 
> I've spent ages arguing with myself about how long it will take to get to a chapter named for a My Chemical Romance lyric - the fic as a whole was really close to being named after one, and a previous chapter had that as a working title for a while before I saved it for later on. I wrote 'Helena' as a working title for this chapter, given that it's about - well, you'll see - and then realised that I'd somehow named it after an MCR song without even realising! So this chapter name stays.
> 
> A huge thank you to anyone who's back reading this again after a rather unplanned hiatus.

Tiredness prickled at the corner of Matilde’s eyes. She was used to waking in the middle of the night: to pick a rare herb, perhaps, whose powers would only be harvestable by moonlight, or called to the birth of a child or a cow, who knew nothing of the hour. She was not at all used to waking in the middle of the night to shuffle, with all the other men of her dormitory, into the chapel to pray. Each bobbing candle light floating above the witches heads seemed to prick and burn at her eyes, and somehow she could never quite find the right place in the rhythm of song, silence, and rote prayer to give in to the huge yawn she felt building in herself.

Her agreement with Edmund had been a couple of days ago now, but it seemed like it had been weeks. Looking back on it, she felt foolish. In the days that had passed since the hunt, as her body had slowly become less saddlesore, she had wanted to fulfil their agreement, to keep an eye out for Salazar and learn what he was doing. But to understand Slytherin’s plans, she would first have to _see_ him, and after the sorting feast, it seemed that he had disappeared into the castle. He did not seem to take his meals in the great hall, never seemed to appear in the corridors, and she had never seen him at mass. As she listened to the drone of a canticle, she thought that she could not blame him on this last point.

She would have liked to communicate this to Edmund, to ask his advice. She could see him now. Matilde was determinedly at the back of the church, somewhere where she could cast an eye over the penitents for Slytherin and Baron Malet. Baron Malet was present as ever, only a few rows ahead of her and surrounded by lackeys. At least she was able to keep an eye on him. Edmund’s fair head was bowed in prayer towards the front of the church. He was so _close_ , that was the rub: in theory, she could walk forward some fifty paces and be able to place a hand on his arm, to talk with him. But even as people would be leaving the mass soon to make their wearily back to bed until the dawn bell, she knew that she would be hard pressed to exchange even a few words with Edmund. Hogwarts was governed by rule and ritual, both spoken and unspoken: holding a conversation after mass was unthinkable, let alone with a Gryffindor. She had much to learn about magic, but some things about the intricate mechanics of the castle had already made themselves perfectly clear.

Matilde gazed up past the floating candles, past the ever-changing image of the night sky above. It was a little insubstantial, like a reflection on a pond – if you tricked your eyes just right, you could see right past it. She had had a lot of time to train her eyes, in Hogwarts’s endless calls to prayer. If you looked just above it, you could see a vaulted ceiling. It was a true work of art: she had never seen anything like it, not even in the new church Lord Jean had been so proud of the work on back at home. Matilde found herself wondering how long it had taken a team of skilled craftsmen, before she realised that this castle had probably never seen a craftsman or a labourer. It seemed to her that the witches of Hogwarts had little care for the work of their hands, not when a wand could do the job as easily. The only exception had been the hunt yesterday. _Some_ things were to be relished the old fashioned way, and killing, it seemed, was one of them.

She stared past the stars, letting her eyes unfocus and then refocus on the delicate carved arches of the castle ceiling. It really was a castle, she thought. Not a school. Not even a monastery. Oh, they would pray, and work, and write like a monastery. But Hogwarts as a _place_ was a castle: towers of new, shining stone stamped onto the hills on the shore of the black lake. As she had ridden through England, through lands newly conquered and reconquered by King Guillame, she had seen plenty of castles just like it: new, tall, impregnable. A castle that said: we are here. This is our land, our place, and that will not be changed.

Commotion rose around her – at last, the interminable prayers were over, and Hogwarts was rising to its feet, ready to return to a few more blessed hours of sleep. People around her began to move, and she wondered what would happen if she were to sleep through the morning mass, if she were simply to lie on her pallet of straw and sleep long, long into the day. No floors to scrub for Marie, no herbs to pick or babies to deliver with Edyth, no horse to ride North, no prayers to recite or endless stone corridors to trudge. She smiled at the thought as she slipped from the chapel, anonymous in the crush of people. Well, no matter what the morning would hold after mass, it seemed certain at this point that she would learn little magic. Hogwarts simply had not known what to do with her, with this scrap of a boy with no Latin and no letters. She had wanted to ask Edmund what it had been like when he first came – he too was far from highborn, and there was no way he had been literate when he first came. While others had gone to the scriptorium, or to endless rooms to practice spells with the strange wooden wands Matilde saw everywhere, she had spent the last few days wandering endless corridors, seeing shafts of sunlight dappled across smooth flagstones, and losing track of each turn.

There was no sunlight on the flagstones at this hour, of course. Outside of the chapel and its thousand floating candles, the lights were dimmer. She might catch a sliver of the moon through one of the long, high windows. She might see the flickering light of a torch, hanging on occasional brackets around the castle but with little rhyme or reason to their placement. More often, when neither was available, the crowd of other witches heading blearily back to their dormitories would simply raise their wands and mutter a spell to turn the tip into a bright point of shining light without any flame. Matilde was grateful for the crowd of witches, for their wands to light her way, for their footsteps treading the labyrinth of Hogwarts so she did not have to navigate it alone.

She liked being in a crowd. She had little in common with the people here, no language, no wand, but no one had to know that. She was simply another witch leaving the chapel, lost and anonymous in the jostle of warm, tired bodies. She was-

Someone placed a hand on her arm, and Matilde stopped dead.

“You’re Robert, aren’t you?” A woman was talking to her, talking in English – but an English with an accent Matilde hadn’t heard before, flowing from syllable to syllable like wild honey. She turned, and the witch reaching for her looked a little older than her. She was tall, with brown hair framing her pale face. For a moment, the curls of her hair falling down to her shoulders made Matilde think of her own hair before Edyth had taken the knife to it. She did not realise it just then, but it was the first time since that day that she had thought of her long hair without immediately thinking of Giselbert touching it.

A moment passed, and she realised that she was supposed to answer. “I am,” she said, staring at the woman who had interrupted her. She looked familiar. Yet men and women were kept quite separate at Hogwarts, and she was, she reminded herself, very much in the former category here. She had had little opportunity to interact with any of the other women here, let alone to talk with them: so why did this stranger feel familiar?

“I’m Helena,” said the girl, in a voice that implied Matilde should understand the significance of that name. “My mother had asked me to see you.”

_My mother_ – and suddenly, Matilde looked at the tall young woman before her and knew exactly why her face looked familiar. If she merely added a few years to that face, if she changed Helena’s nervous energy to calm poise, and if she placed that circlet of metal over her brow. “Rowena’s daughter,” Matilde breathed.

She had not intended to say it aloud, and Helena looked at her with amusement. “Yes, exactly,” she said. “She sent me to find you. I’ve heard you do not have any Latin? That you cannot read?”

The lilt in her voice was soothing, but not so soothing that Matilde did not immediately worry at the words it was camouflaging. Rowena, self-appointed Queen of All Witches, would surely not stand for Robert’s ignorance. Matilde took a deep breath. “I can’t,” she said. “I was hoping to learn, but they have turned me away from the scriptorium, and I am-“

“Quiet!” Helena said, gripping her arm tight. Matilde instinctively fell silent, knowing that this was it – that all her worst fears had come true, and that this was the moment where she would be banished from Hogwarts. “Get back here, out of the light…”

Helena’s nails pressed into Matilde’s skin, hard enough to mark it, and she found herself dragged along the corridor, into a pool of shadow between the torch brackets. She was too surprised to say much except utter a single muffled squeak, which made Helena stare daggers at her. She found herself pressed against the wall in the dark, Helena’s arm in front of her to prevent her from moving, and then she realised: there were footsteps coming. A few footsteps, a heavy, brisk tread: they were growing steadily closer, but still quite faint – how Helena had heard them at all moments ago was a mystery. Matilde could feel Helena’s arm shaking gently. Not knowing what to do, she placed a hand over Helena’s, trying to calm her like she’d calm a startled animal, as the footsteps rounded the corner.

Baron Malet strode through the corridor, a guard flanking him on either side. Matilde found herself holding her breath without giving it a thought: next to her, Helena was so silent, so still that she could not possibly be breathing either. Matilde and Helena stood frozen to the wall, praying no one would turn their head: but the Baron moved with purpose, and only a few taut, agonising seconds passed before he and his compatriots had swept around a corner.

They both let out long, slow breaths. Helena’s arm released Matilde, but Matilde made no motion to move away from the wall, instead she slid down it towards the floor, legs bent, perched on her heels.

“I’m sorry,” Helena said, breathless. “I know that was sudden, that I acted quite improperly - I should explain myself-“

Matilde shook her head. “No, I understand. I know I arrived at Hogwarts with the Baron, but I’m not really…. _His_ man.” _In more ways than one,_ she added to herself with a smile.

“Ever since the welcoming feast, when I played the harp,” Helena said, brushing a lock of hair out of her face, “he’s had his eye on me.” She shuddered, and Matilde understood entirely. “He keeps finding excuses to talk to me, and he’s…” she shrugged.

Matilde thought. _She_ knew exactly what Helena was saying: but would Robert? She would have to play this carefully. “When we were travelling,” she said slowly, playing for time, “he… disrespected a woman. In front of her husband, and all his company.” She stood slowly, pacing the corridor. “It’s good to stay away from him,” she said simply. There. That had not been so bad. A slight stretch of the truth, a little vagueness – but she felt fairly confident that that was how Robert would have explained it, not Matilde.

Helena nodded. “That doesn’t surprise me. He has the good sense not to be too obvious, not in front of Mother, but I can see his intentions. Still, I’m sorry, Robert, I know we’ve just met…”

Matilde cut across her. Now that the shock had worn off, she was overflowing with questions, all of them racing to make it to her tongue. The one that made it out first was: “How did you know he was coming?”

Helena smiled. She clasped her hands together, moving her long fingers in a complicated blur of motion. Matilde thought she was just trying to let out some of the tension of the Baron’s passage through their movement; but a moment later she had pulled a bright silver ring from her finger and waved it before Matilde.

“Oh, back when he first started bothering me, I put an enchantment onto this ring. If he’s close, it starts to burn,” she said, her words flowing together like a melody, like notes rippling from her harp. Matilde realised that she did not only recognise Helena for sharing her Mother’s face. She remembered her playing at the feast: she remembered those same pale, elegant fingers coaxing note after note from the harp strings. “I got the idea of a wearable charm from mother and that damn diadem…” she was tossing the ring between her two hands, never still, eventually sliding it back onto her fingers.

Matilde had no idea what a diadem was, but she had more than enough questions for this girl, and decided that that was one of the least important ones. She sighed. Perhaps it was time to face the music. “You said your mother had sent you to find me? Because of my Latin?” Since the mad dash to the shadows, she doubted now that where this was leading could be quite as bad.

“Yes, of course,” Helena said, “I’m sorry, Baron Malet distracted me-“

“That’s quite alright,” Matilde said. She felt like she was trying to soothe a sparrow, all tiny, fast motions, hopping from one spot to another.

“When someone without any Latin, or without his letters, comes to Hogwarts, there is always a tutor assigned to help them,” Helena began, in one rattling breath. “I’ve always been good with other tongues, particularly English, so mother has said I should tutor you.”

“I… that would be wonderful,” Matilde said. Her heart was still pounding from the Baron, and she wished she could calm herself properly: this offer had managed to catch her entirely off guard, and yet it seemed so obvious in retrospect. “What should I-“

“Wonderful!” Helena said, twisting the ring back onto her finger. It was not the only one she wore, Matilde realised. On both of her hands, Helena wore more silver than Matilde could ever hope to have in her whole life. “We can meet after _lauds_ mass tomorrow. When people are going to the scriptorium, we can work on your writing. The Latin will be harder, but…” she shrugged and barely managing to cover her mouth as she yawned. “I’m sure you’ll be more than up for the task.”

“I’ll see you there,” said Matilde, yawning alike.

***

Morning came and after _lauds,_ Matilde found herself in an annex. It was one of the outcropping of tiny rooms around Hogwarts without apparent purpose: this particular one had sprouted from the side of the scriptorium like a plant sending out a new shoot. An abundance of light shone through high windows, aided by the flickering light of a couple of candles on the long table before them, but they were shut away from the quiet scribblings of Hogwarts other devoted scholars: it would be easy, Helena explained, for them to talk here so that she might teach Matilde properly without disturbing the almost-eery silence of the scriptorium.

The empty sheet of vellum stretched in front of Matilde like a fresh-ploughed field in spring. She gripped the quill between her thumb and two fingers with distaste. Helena peered over at her, fretting anxiously. 

“Good,” Helena said, examining Matilde’s clumsy grip on the feather. She flourished a wand with ease and tapped at the tiny clay pot before Matilde, muttering a word in Latin. Matilde was so enchanted with the movement of her hands, with the shining of candlelight reflecting from the rings on those elegant white fingers, that she didn’t notice that for a moment, nothing happened. Helena frowned. Her wand tapped the inkwell again, and it began to fill with a rich black ink. “Now,” she said, “see if you can copy over this…”

She flourished her wand across the page in a complicated squiggle, and a glowing trail of golden light followed the wand’s tip, leaving a symbol emblazoned across the vellum in light. Matilde stared at it dispassionately. She had heard, barely, of rune magic when she learned with Edyth. They had planned to make a study of it this winter, crowded around her fire in the long dark quiet of the year. Those plans felt long gone now, so far away that looking back on them was like looking back into another life. But she did recognise this symbol before her. Oh, Helena might know it as one of the letters of her Latin script, but this was a rune, alright. She knew that if she pulled the bones from her pack, that one unhappy reminder of Giselbert she did not quite seem able to get rid of, she would see there a single fragment engraved with the same symbol.

“ _Rād_ ,” she breathed, speaking the rune’s name. She had not meant to say anything, and found Helena looking on at her curiously. Not knowing what else to say, she trawled the depths of her memory for what else she could remember: there was something in the girl’s look that was a question, an invitation, and she could not help but share. “The rune of the rider. For a brave traveller, and a long journey…”

That was what her rune bones had said ever since she left Edyth, every time she cast them: just the rider, again and again. It was so reliable, so opaque, that she had not bothered throwing them since they had crossed the border into Scotland. Perhaps now she had arrived, if she were to cast the bones again, she would finally learn something new. But she did not like to think of the bones or the unhappy chance that had brought them to her. Sometimes, when she was half-asleep, she felt her hand close around them in their leather pouch – but that did not mean she had to bring them out.

“You know rune-magic?” Asked Helena. Matilde looked up at her, and realised that the girl was staring at her, eyes wide. She hurriedly looked down, back at the stretch of vellum in front of her, with the golden glow of the _rād_ still drawn huge across it.

She took her time replying, dipping her quill in the still black ink. Slowly, her hand shaking a little with the attention it took to draw the nib across the rough page before her, she followed the golden trace of the letter. Her attempt wobbled across the page, and she had to ease the pressure on the quill several times for fear of passing straight through.

“Not quite,” Matilde said through gritted teeth. It was hard to speak as she tried to trace this pattern across the page. Perhaps that was why the scriptorium was so silent. “But there was a witch in my village, a Saxon woman. Before I came here, to Hogwarts, she started to tell me of her magic. I learnt just the beginnings of the runes, the first letters of the Futhark…” She pulled the quill away from the parchment, and examined her handiwork with a critical eye. The trouble was that runes were easy: clear, straight lines. It all felt so much more attainable, even with this strange, delicate tool. It was certainly easier than the strange, flowing curves of Helena’s Latin hand.

“Not bad,” Helena said. Matilde did not need Salazar’s skill of reaching into a mind to know that it was a polite lie. “I hope I’ll know the runes soon enough,” Helena continued, frowning. “Mother is teaching me nearly every language of the isles, you see. That’s why I speak English to you now, and why I can speak with the servants and stablehands here in Gaelic if I please. But I’m not sure even she knows much of their magic: just the letters themselves.”

“So you’re from-“ Matilde asked.

“Wales,” said Helena. “Well, Mother is. I’m _from_ Hogwarts, I was born here – I’ve never been more than a few miles from Hogwarts and the lake.” For a moment, she paused, all the quick, darting energy of her sucked out. “But she’s taught me each and every language,” she said, and it was as though she had never hesitated. “And this rune – the rider, you said?” Matilde tried to agree, but she left no space for her to, the words a river flowing from her mouth, “It’s the same as a letter in the Latin alphabet, the letter R.” She gave Matilde a hard look, a look that Matilde could not understand for the life of her. “Bringing together the old ways and the new,” Helena said, as if to herself, “and is that not the foundation of all of our magic here?” Matilde said nothing, but privately doubted that. She had seen little of any old ways she would recognise here. All was new, and alien, and wrong. “So if I were to write your name…” Helena continued, and plucking the quill delicately from Matilde’s fingers, she wrote a set of symbols beginning with the same letter in a corner of the parchment.

“My name…” Matilde began. _Oh_. Oh, of course. For just a moment, Matilde had been so focused on this strange art of writing, so focused on showing what she knew to Helena, on proving that she knew _something_ of magic, that she had forgotten to be Robert entirely. Of course _Robert’s_ name would start like that.

“That’s right,” Helena said, with a somewhat disarming smile, “I thought perhaps that copying it wouldn’t be a bad place to start writing. There’ll be time for copying from the scriptures and from the books of arcana once you have a stronger hand – we may as well start you with something easier to understand.” Her hands – never still – gestured towards the papers she had before her. There were pages of a cramped, careless hand, dotted with flyaway specks of ink. Often it was hard to see where one single letter ended and another began: each word seemed to be a flow, a long squiggle of vague shapes instead of the lonely symbols she expected. Then there were the other pages: pages Helena had clearly spent much time on, each of the letters carefully spaced. In the margins, vines burst into fruit and witches stretched out thin wands. Sometimes, one of the letters at the start of a line or a page would be drawn huge, adorned in many colours and contained in a box of flowers, of fresh fruits, of running hares… Matilde found her eyes gravitating to an R, set out upon the page with infinitely more care and skill than she could ever hope to master. There were other letters she might recognise as runes, but she didn’t know what they were called in Latin – it was the only letter on the whole page that she could name. She felt herself flushed, embarrassed – here were these beautifully crafted pages of words, and all she could do was scour them for a single letter.

Helena saw her staring at the loose pages, and reached impulsively to straighten them. “Mother’s notes,” she said. “She won’t trust anyone else with them. I’m to copy them out and make them beautiful: when they’re ready, they’ll go into the library here.” Matilde nodded absently. Helena talked of her mother a lot: but who, she wondered, was Helena’s father? Rowena had no husband at Hogwarts that she had seen. She did not wear a widow’s black. Matilde knew that she could not possibly ask, but perhaps she was not alone in carrying the shame of an unknown father. She gave Helena a smile. She was glad to have something in common with her.

Helena reached over with her wand and tapped the vellum in front of Matilde, her wand touching the huge R she had scrawled across it. In an instant, the ink faded to nothing, and Matilde struggled to suppress a gasp. All of that work, gone in an instant. “Sorry,” Helena said with a grimace, “but the vellum’s expensive, see? We haven’t yet got a spell to conjure it that’s better than the real thing, and I can’t have you wasting sheet after sheet as we practice your letters, can I?” She waved her wand over the sheet, frowned, and waved it again, a lock of her hair slipping over her face as she concentrated on mumbling an incantation. Light lines were scored across the page, stretching one edge to another. Helena picked up the quill again, and she wrote a series of letters across the page, starting with R. The letters were easily twice as high as the ones Helena had been copying on her own work. Matilde guessed that it was her name – Robert’s name, rather – again. “There,” Helena said. “Now, if you write along the lines, and copy that, until the end of the page, perhaps it will help you grow accustomed to a quill.” She leant back, stretching her back, before moving further down the bench and beginning to spread out the loose sheets of her own work.

Matilde stared at the word before her, trying to memorise each shape, willing some understanding. It was hard not to feel stupid, particularly next to Helena: it seemed that she had needed hardly a moment to bury herself into writing at such speed Matilde half wondered if she had cast a charm on herself. She thought back to the hunt, and to her conversation with Edmund, a few days ago. She could do magic without a wand. She could tell a creature what it wanted so convincingly that they believed her. She could move pain. She could do so much magic that no one at Hogwarts had any idea of. So what if they could read, and write? She could learn that, and it would be far easier than learning the real magic, the practical witchery that she had learned with Edyth. She would like to see these pampered, spoiled witches learn any of that magic. Matilde picked up the pen and began, slowly, shakily, to copy the letters before her.

It was hard, thankless work, made no easier by the flying quill of her fellow scholar. Surely the beautiful script Helena produced could only be made by slow, deliberate movements: but she was a blur of unceasing activity, her quill gliding across the page and dipping back in an inkwell she intermittently tapped with a wand to refill. Matilde had managed to copy the letters she had been assured were Robert’s name, twice: the second set of strokes were, if anything, shakier than the first.

“What are the notes that you’re copying?” Matilde asked, her pen starting the curves of another R. Perhaps a little conversation would make the time pass a little quicker.

Helena looked up. Somehow in the flurry of movement, she had managed to smear ink across one cheek: she brushed vaguely at it with one hand as she answered. “Mother’s notes? Oh, they’re just about magic in England. The Stone, you know?”

“I’m not sure I do,” Matilde said. The way that Helena had said The Stone was more than just any stone – it was the difference between the way Giselbert had once referred to Lord Jean as the lord, but to God as the Lord. She gritted her teeth at the thought of Giselbert, suddenly uncomfortable in her own skin. She felt uneasy with Helena’s casual discussion of this stone as though it were something she should know. She might have been a Norman by birth, but she was the one who knew a little of the runestones and could cast spells without Latin, without a wand: she had thought that she was the one here who knew of English magic.

“In London?” Helena said. “The Adder Stone, you know?”

Matilde shook her head. She still understood nothing, but her thoughts were racing. An adder stone, a subject of much magical study – could this be something to do with Salazar? The adder under his control, the language of snakes…it would all make sense. “I’ve never been to London,” she said. “I haven’t heard of this…”

“You said your mentor, the one who taught you some magic, was Saxon, didn’t you?” Helena said. Matilde nodded. They had both set their quills down now. “Well, perhaps that’s it,” said Helena, with a strange smile playing across her face. “There’s more than one way to cast a spell, and different folk learn it differently,” said Helena, and she shot a strange, regretful look at her wand. “The Saxons may have lived in the islands for far longer than the Normans, but there are some older than them…” She looked at Matilde’s furrowed brow, and continued, her quill set down upon the table. Outside, the scriptorium seemed to be a place of entirely silent work – Matilde was glad she was able to talk here, to learn more than just her letters and a little Latin. She had years at Hogwarts to learn that, after all. “My mother’s people were in the islands many lifetimes before the Saxons, after all, and they have their own magic, old magic, the magic of the druids and of the land.” Matilde nodded. In all of her study of magic with Edyth she had been more focused on the practicalities of spells and poultices than the history of magic, of who had first brought what spell to Britain. Henbane was for gutache, St John’s wort was for a fever. Life was to be preserved, pain was to be banished. Those were the _rules_. Magic simply was, an unerringly true fact about the universe – there was no sense that it had come from somewhere.

“There are small adder stones all around us,” Helena continued, barely slowing. “If you’ve ever found a stone with a hole worn through it, that’s an adder stone, a small one.”

“I think…” Matilde cast her memory back. “I think that the witch who taught me, Edyth… I think she might have had one.” It was the first time she had spoken Edyth’s name aloud for many weeks, since she had mentioned her at the first stop on her great journey North. It felt strange to finally speak of her again, to hear her name on Robert’s tongue. “But I never saw her pick it up or use it for a spell, it was just there, in her house. She certainly never said anything about snakes…”

“That’s how it can be with the old magic,” said Helena. “We keep something because of its power, long after the nature of that power has been forgotten.” Matilde was not quite convinced by her simple assessment – it seemed to her that Edyth, stooped and gnarled with years, was far more likely to remember old magic than either Helena or her mother. “But The Stone…” Helena continued, dabbing again at the ink smeared across her face, “The Grand Adder Stone stands underneath London, in a cave rich in arcane power, and it’s huge, much taller than a man. Far too big to be picked up or moved, even by magic. I’ve never seen it, but mother says that it stands so tall that the hole is big enough for you to fit through if you crouched, though, of course, you wouldn’t…” she trailed off, shaking her head as though in awe of the magic the stone could hold. “They say,” she said, her voice taking on a conspiratorial note, “that when the Romans first came to Britain, they came because the Emperor of Rome’s seers wished to study and understand the Great Adder Stone. And they say that when King Guillame claimed he had the right to the throne, it was because his advisors wanted the same thing…”

Helena stopped abruptly, and sat watching Matilde – she realised that the girl was monitoring her reaction, cautious she’d said too much. She smiled involuntarily – she was sure that the Baron and his party would feel otherwise, but she had not the least interest in defending the honour of her king. “You can say what you want about the Bastard here,” she said, shrugging her shoulders. “I don’t care why he came here, or if he’s the true king, or who’s telling him what. I just care that he dragged me along with him to Britain.”

Helena gave her a nod of recognition, of thanks, but the slip of her tongue seemed to have drained all the energy from her. She picked her wand up, and seemed to be in imminent danger of looking at Matilde’s scrawl and resuming the lesson. Matilde realised she had to lay her guesses on The Stone out before her to keep the conversation from moving on. “So the Adder Stone…” she said, and it had the desired attention: Helena’s attention snapped back to her instantly. “What does it _do?_ What would happen if you were to go through the hole? Would you…” she swallowed, aware that it might sound ridiculous as soon as she said it, “would you be able to speak to snakes? To command them?”

Helena stared at her. “To talk to snakes?” She said, looking at Matilde askance. “No, it’s not called an adder stone because…” she shook her head slowly. “If you were to go through the stone, you’d never return, Robert. The Grand Adder Stone is the barrier between our world and the land of the spirits. Between life and death itself.” She gave Matilde another long, considered look, and seemed to suddenly wake up as though from a trance. “Now,” she said, “let us see how the writing of your name has gone…”

Matilde groaned internally, but try as she might, there was no more diverting of the conversation from matters of letters for the rest of the day.


	12. A Serpent in the Garden

Weeks passed. The dark forest that stretched its arms around Hogwarts was fully in leaf now, with tiny bluebells poking up in the shade. Day after day, weak sunshine jockeyed for position with driving rain – but slowly, it seemed as though the sunshine was winning.

Edmund had been looking for Robert, too, but the time was never right. Robert was swept up in the tide of Slytherins: eating with them, traipsing to mass with them, sleeping with the other Slytherin men in their corner of the dormitories. He did not _talk_ with his fellow apprentices, but he seemed unable to escape them nonetheless. It was as if Slytherin’s men had sensed Robert’s betrayal, his willingness to work with one of Gryffindor’s men, and had simply closed ranks around Robert, forming a wall Edmund could not hope to penetrate. He had spent the last eight years avoiding even a glance at the witches of Slytherin - now, he felt as though he had a hard time looking anywhere else.

His best hope, he had thought, was to catch Robert in the scriptorium. Depending on who was presiding over the room, if he could just sit next to him, he might be able to maybe exchange a few quiet words. There, they could arrange a time to meet again, could compare what they had found so far, could plot further. But day after day passed in the scriptorium, and there was no sign of Robert. _Of course_ , Edmund remembered, around a week after the hunt. _He doesn’t speak any Latin. Did he say if he could even write?_ Distracted, his quill had gone directly through his vellum and an ugly blot of ink spread across the page, spoiling a neat page on the metamorphosis of objects to animals. He sighed, and pulled out his wand.

He saw Robert with Helena a few days later, and understood why he was not in the scriptorium. Edmund felt like he should have remembered, but his own private lessons in Latin, in the written word, felt like forever ago. Godric had been a patient teacher, attentive, surprisingly gentle after all the tales he had heard of the man’s glory in battle. Perhaps he had needed something else to draw his attention after he had taken up arms in the chapel and his duel with Slytherin. But whatever Godric’s reasons, he had spent long hours with Edmund until Edmund had been able to speak Latin as well as any priest, to read both silently and aloud, and to copy and write in an immaculate hand. He was not sure he had quite appreciated it at the time, but looking back, he was grateful – it had been a perfect introduction to the life he would have at Hogwarts. Long afternoons of copying the same treatises until his wrist cramped and his neck ached, long evenings of instruction on casting the same spell over and over again until it was second nature: these things came as naturally as breathing now. There were nights when he closed his eyes and the blank page would still swim before it, demanding to be filled with endless inkstrokes. It kept him busy.

He sat in the scriptorium now, looking at the page of text a quick spell had just rescued from an unsightly inkblot spoiling the whole thing. He should be sharpening his quill, continuing to write – but instead, he looked at his own writing, at line after line of text he had written. On a whim, he screwed his eyes. tight and opened them. He let them focus and refocus, looked away and looked back. He was trying to find a way to look at the letters anew, to see with fresh eyes and forget the trick of their meaning. He wanted to see the written page as Robert must be seeing it while he was sitting with Helena. He had not realized that anyone would teach the letters other than the four founders themselves – but he supposed that, however convenient it would be for their plans, it was unlikely Salazar would break the habit of years and deign to appear in the scriptorium.

Edmund had to admit that whenever he did manage to connect with Robert, he would have nothing to report on Salazar. Perhaps one of Slytherin’s own apprentices would have better luck in tracking him down, but while Edmund half expected to see him lurking in every deep shadow or around each new twist of the corridor, he had seen neither hide nor hair of Salazar since the sorting feast. But when the next morning came, Edmund realised that he didn’t need to _see_ Salazar to know that the man had been hard at work. He had slept well: he had not heard any sounds of straining wood, of stone scraping on stone. Yet something about the castle was definitely changed.

After the exhausted trek across the castle to _lauds_ mass, Edmund was surprised to find a low chatter of voices coming from the chapel. There was a buzzing, an energy entirely unsuited to so early on a cold, wet Thursday. One elderly witch even stuck his head outside the door, stepped into the corridor, and stepped back in in wonder.

“Is something wrong?” Alfric asked. His bony hand gripped Edmund’s arm a little tighter.

“I don’t know,” Edmund said. Slowly, picking his way through a crowd as confused, as tired, as abuzz with curiosity as himself, he lead Alfric through the church doors – and gasped.

“Magic has been done here,” Alfric said simply – and he was right. The chapel had been somewhat cramped before, packed from wall to wall with Hogwarts’ faithful at mass every day. But suddenly it stretched out, vast, easily twice the size it had been before. Quite how this could be was beyond Edmund’s understanding: the courtyard outside did not seem any smaller, and none of the adjacent rooms had disappeared. “I’m right, aren’t I?” Alfric asked.

“You are,” Edmund said, awestruck. The room was overwhelming: suddenly huge, filled with movement, incredulous chatter, and endless new details to puzzle over. “How did you know?”

Alfric chuckled. “These old eyes aren’t up for much, but even I can hear the echo’s changed. What did Salazar _do_ to this place?”

Edmund just shrugged. Of course this would be Salazar’s handiwork: but right at this moment, he could barely even think of that as he took in its majesty. Any attempt at mass was forgotten in this moment: the witches of Hogwarts were wandering the sudden vast expanse, talking in small groups of twos or threes or perhaps simply staring, silent. Even the priest seemed reluctant to give any kind of call to worship: he simply stood at the lecturn, eyes wide, his mouth occasionally opening and closing but no sound coming out. Around the congregants, the growing light of dawn filtered in through windows of coloured glass, each easily twice Edmund’s height, high on the walls where no windows had been before. Each window illustrated a moment in the life of the saints. Saint Merlin, Saint Mungo, Saint Brigid, Saint Gobnait: all the paragons and martyrs of witchcraft moved across the windows, lifting wands, casting spells and reenacting their martyrdom in vibrant colours glowing under the dawn of the enchanted sky. Alfric stood next to Edmund, gripping his arm tight, as Edmund did his best to describe the room, the changes, the sheer scale and majesty to him.

“I can… I think I can see the light,” Alfric said, nodding. Wide, empty eyes looked towards the windows, trying as hard as they could to take in their splendour. “And perhaps the colour, but it’s so hard to tell – everything shifts, changes…”

“You and I both know I’m hardly Slytherin’s firmest friend,” said a voice behind them: and Carwyn was there, having slipped his way into the conversation. “But I have to admit – the old snake has outdone himself this time.”

“It’s beautiful,” Alfric proclaimed. “Even the little that I can see…”

Edmund nodded, saying nothing. His eyes had been following the details carved into the stone around the top of a pillar. Vines had been carved into the rock, the stems bearing flowers and fruit – and intertwined with the stem, he could see a single, solitary snake. He thought of the story Robert had told him about Salazar and the coiled serpent up his sleeve, and he felt sick. The chapel around him might be beautiful, but it felt like a beauty he couldn’t trust. “It’s beautiful,” he said at last, “but what’s this _for_?” He felt as though his eyes were looking over the room and its beauties again, searching each flagstone and each newly set pane of glass with suspicion.

Carwyn looked at him askance. “What’s it for? Well, with how we’ve been growing, we’ve long needed a new chapel-“

“No,” said Edmund, shaking his head, “why now? Is this some kind of apology? Has he _done_ something?”

“Edmund,” said Alfric, sighing. “Please, on today of all days…”

Carwyn shrugged. “Maybe it is an apology,” he said, “but wherever you are leading us, Edmund, I don’t know if I can follow. I think that if he is atoning for some sin, it is doubtless the time he took up arms in this chapel years ago, not some imagined new travesty. Now he can ease his conscience with the fact that he gave us this magnificent chapel, and continue to do whatever strange magics occupy his time.”

“But…” Edmund sighed, knowing there was no point continuing. Robert would understand, would agree – he cast a wild eye through the crowd for him.

“Look,” said Carwyn, “I’m glad I found you here, Edmund. I came to find you for more than admiring the architecture.”

Edmund sighed and paused in his search. Carwyn had never asked a favour of him before, and he was not sure if the prospect should fill him with excitement or apprehension. “Oh?” He said, turning back and trying to get a measure of the request that was coming.

“I’ve been here too long,” Carwyn continued. “My feet are beginning to itch for the road: I’ve made promises that I’ll be back in England with my father by the height of summer, so I’ll need to be leaving soon. But I still have work to do here. But…” Carwyn hesitated for a moment, and Edmund’s stomach began to sink. “Look,” Carwyn said, “I’ll cut right to it. The Baron and all his men need wands. I know they’re far from your favourite people, and believe me I do not relish this job either, but it is a job that needs doing. I’ll be taking them to the grove for the wandmaking ceremony this afternoon, along with a few others, but it’s more work than I’d be able to take on by myself. I’ve never had to cut for so many before.” Edmund moved to speak, to object, but Carwyn held up a hand. “Please, consider it,” he said. “You’re a bright lad, and I could do with a trustworthy pair of hands at my side. Besides,” he said, laying a hand on Edmund’s shoulder, “I believe you owe me for my loan of Hornbeam at the hunt?”

He fixed Edmund with a wide smile, a grin so ingratiating that for a moment Edmund forgot what had happened after that generous loan: Carwyn bounding after the quarry, leaving Edmund alone and barely in control of his horse. Edmund took a deep breath, trying to find the words that would encompass that moment. Why, if Robert hadn’t found him…

And just then he saw Robert: unhappily locked, as ever, behind a wall of other Slytherins – and Edmund realised. “I _do_ owe you,” he said. “Of course I’ll be there, Carwyn.”

Carwyn raised an eyebrow. “I have to admit, I thought you’d be harder to convince,” he said. “I thought for sure that your hatred for our Norman invaders would be _far_ stronger than my attempt to ask nicely. I was going to get the old man in on it, try to appeal to your better nature… I had all sorts of things planned.” He clapped Edmund on the back. “I’ll have to save it for the next favour.”

Edmund smiled. “Well, I’m doing it for you, not for the Baron and his men,” he said. “Gryffindor’s men stick together. That’s what you told me, isn’t it?” He cast a look over Carwyn’s shoulder at Robert again, trying frantically to catch his eye. Robert would need a wand as much as anyone else – and perhaps as they went to the wandwood cutting, he would finally get the chance to discuss Slytherin’s latest changes to Hogwarts with a sympathetic audience.

***

Hogwarts clung to the shore of the black lake, but around Hogwarts, around the lake – almost, it seemed, to the edge of the world – the dark forest stretched. It was a cool day: the morning dew still lay heavy in the grass, and the leaves of the trees all around barely shook as Carwyn lead his party over the drawbridge onto the trail.

“I think we have them all,” Carwyn said. He was wearing a heavy grey travelling cloak and craning his neck to count each of the pilgrims they were escorting. There were maybe a dozen of them. Most of them were the Normans, the Baron standing tall in the center talking loudly with his men. It made Edmund realise how many of the people the Baron had brought were servants, men with no magic here simply to attend to him. Edmund saw Robert hovering unhappily towards the edges of the Norman grouping, and crossed his fingers – surely in the long journey into the woods, he would have the chance to talk to him.

“It looks like everyone,” Edmund panted. Back in the courtyard, he had volunteered to carry the bags that Carwyn had packed with tools for the ceremonial wand cutting in the grove. Carwyn had made them look so light, so easy, but Edmund was already out of breath after a few scant minutes. Nothing that a flick of his wand wouldn’t normally solve, but Carwyn had been strict – no magic on this trip. It was part of the ceremony, the mystery. His wand was waiting safely with Alfric back at the castle. He could not help but cast a glance at Robert, wishing he had some of his skills and could cast a spell to lift the bags without need for a wand.

“Anyone else can damn well make their own wand,” Carwyn said. “This alone is still plenty of work for me.” He sighed. “Thank you for coming out,” he said. “I really do appreciate it. Perhaps after this, we can discuss…” Carwyn trailed off, and Edmund looked around to see that Baron Malet was approaching. His stomach did an uneasy flip as the man came closer, trailed by two huge Normans.

“Ollivander?” The Baron said. Carwyn gave a small, formal bow. “We had best be headed into the forest to this ceremony of yours.” Edmund saw the man raise an eyebrow, but looked away, not wanting to catch his eye. “My men are growing restless,” the Baron continued. “I have read the omens, and today is to be the last good hunting weather we will have for some time,” he said. “If I must lose that chance, I would rather we be done with this as quickly as we can.”

“Of course, my Lord,” said Carwyn, and there was a falseness in his voice that Edmund did not know if he had heard before. “If you are sure all of your men are here, we can make our way into the woods. You may not have the thrill of the chase, but I promise you – you will sight a fine quarry, and it will be very much worth your while.”

The Baron walked back to his men without another word, seemingly satisfied. Edmund was pleased to hear Carwyn mutter a string of curse words under his breath.

“I hate him,” Edmund began, in hushed tones. “How can you stay so calm, when he treats you like that? After all, you’re…”

Carwyn held a hand up to stop him. “Edmund, please,” he said. He gave him a slightly strained smile. “When you are in this line of work, you will have to hold court with the mighty,” he said, “and you will quickly learn that the mighty are not always the easiest to work with.” He sighed. “Luckily for me, the mighty are also able to pay extremely well.”

Edmund frowned. “Pay?” He said. “I don’t understand, is Baron Malet offering you silver to-“

“No,” Carwyn said, laughing. “No, don’t worry, the Ollivanders still don’t charge for the work they do at Hogwarts. But there’s more than one way a wealthy man can pay, and when I am down in London, I am sure that saying I have the son of Lord Guilame Malet as a client will be _invaluable_ to help open more doors at court.” He sighed. “It’s an unpleasant business, but I promise you, it will be more than worth my while in the end to endure one day of this treatment.” Edmund tried to interject, but before he could say anything else, Carwyn raised his voice to a clear clarion call, addressing the crowd milling behind them.

“My Lords,” he said, and all other talk stilled. “My lords, it is time.” He spoke in Latin, and Edmund thought of Robert, wondering if his learning would have got to the point where he could comprehend this. He didn’t see him in the crowd – but no matter, he would have plenty of time to find him on the walk into the dark forest. “In your time at Hogwarts,” Carwyn continued, “you will have seen all manner of magic done. Perhaps there are things you do not understand, or spells that you wish you were able to do. Our magic is directed, is improved, is perhaps _perfected_ by use of a wand.” Edmund wished he could see Robert’s face in the crowd – he was sure his eyes would be rolling. “You may,” Carwyn said, “have felt left out of the chance to train in magic here, to study it and understand it without the use of a wand. Well, my name is Carwyn Ollivander, and my family has been creating artisan wands since before the time of Christ.”

Carwyn left a pause for impressed whispers. Edmund, who just about remembered this speech from when Carwyn had taken him to get his own wand, some weeks after he had arrived at Hogwarts, remembered the awe he had felt. But it seemed that the Normans were less interested. They were not chattering again, true, but the Baron was staring ahead with cold grey eyes, unmoved, and the rest of his men seemed to be mirroring his attitude.

“Hogwarts has stood for some two score years,” Carwyn said, unphased by the lack of reaction to his pronouncements, “but the ritual we will take part in today has roots far older than that. I will not simply give you a wand: we must give something to the magic that surrounds us, must make some small sacrifice, and with patience, care and craft, we will be able to gather everything we need from the forest to make you a wand that is truly unique to you.” He looked around the crowd before him. “I promise you,” he said, “you will see marvels and wonders today. Follow me, and stick to the path: there are things in these woods I would not wish to encounter unarmed.”

Edmund wondered uneasily what those things could be. But it was too late to ask Carwyn – the crowd had already begun to move, and it seemed that Carwyn had fallen ahead. There was no way that Edmund would be able to catch up, not with the heavy bags he was carrying. Not that he would want to, either. Falling behind was the entire reason he had come here: at the back of the trail of witches through the woods, he and Robert would be able to talk entirely undisturbed.

As he lagged further back, and witch after witch passed him, Edmund looked for Robert with increasing franticness. Surely, he could not have simply disappeared? He knew that he might be unenthusiastic about owning a wand – perhaps Carwyn’s bold claims about the superiority of wanded magic had simply proved to much for the boy, and he had slipped back into Hogwarts? In their conversation on the hunt, he had seemed to have little regard for the castle. But just as Edmund fell to the very end of the procession, the heavy bags swinging and jostling each other, he heard a familiar voice from behind him.

“Edmund?” He turned, and Robert was there. Both smiled. “Thank God,” said Robert. “I thought I’d never get the chance to talk with you.”

“I could never find the time in the castle,” Edmund replied, breathing heavily. He was beginning to regret volunteering to carry both of Carwyn’s bags – surely a packmule would be better suited for this task than he would. “I volunteered to help Carwyn out with the wand ceremony because I knew you’d be here, and perhaps we’d have time to-“

“Of course,” Robert added, nodding and cutting across him. “This Carwyn certainly has a lot of thoughts about his wands, doesn’t he?” He said, one eyebrow raised.

“I was wondering what you thought!” Edmund said, laughing, and for a moment he lost control of the heavy bag he was carrying. It swung just a little more than normal, brusing against his shin, and he winced.

It was not a bad hit, and he barely thought he’d reacted, but Robert was there in a moment. “Is everything alright?”

“Yes, of course,” Edmund said, resenting how out of breath he sounded. “Carwyn just gave me these bags, and…” he shrugged, and the bags swung against him again, and he wished he hadn’t.

Robert looked at them. “Can’t you lighten them by magic?”

Edmund shrugged. “We’re not to take our wands into the grove – it’s part of the ceremony.” He had expected a long answer from Robert, some mockery of Carwyn’s insistence on the magic of the wand, but instead the boy just smiled and placed a hand on each of the bags of tools. Instantly, they were lighter – it felt as though they were floating on the air in front of him. “Thank you,” he said. He hadn’t quite realised how heavy the bags were until he was not bearing the weight of them: now he realised he could hardly tell if he’d have made it deep enough into the wood for the ceremony without Robert’s help.

“Of course,” said Robert. “I hope I’m not spoiling this ceremony by lending you a hand?”

“Hardly,” said Edmund. He grinned. “I might not understand your magic, but it’s good to see you, Robert.”

There was a moment’s pause. “It’s good to see you too,” Robert said. For just a moment he had seemed distracted. Edmund had a horrible sinking feeling that he was trying to avoid his eye, but it wasn’t just that – the boy had been looking over his shoulder entirely, right past him and into the bushes at the side of the trail. Like he was looking for something. “I have to confess,” Robert continued, “I’ve wanted to talk to you for weeks, but I’ve seen _nothing_ of Salazar.”

“Me neither,” Edmund said, “not since the night you came.” He supposed he should feel disappointment, but he didn’t; it was good to be outside the castle, to be talking with Robert as if no time had passed since they last met. “But then there was the chapel this morning, at least…”

For a moment, Robert looked at him blankly. “The chapel?” He asked, and then, a moment later, realised. “Of course, the chapel this morning!” He hesitated, again looking away from Edmund to the side of the road. “That was him?”

“Salazar’s the one who does almost all the magic to build the castle,” Edmund said. “Ever since he first started becoming reclusive, you sometimes won’t see him for weeks or months, but he’s still _there_ somewhere, changing and building and rebuilding the castle by magic.”

“But Salazar never comes to mass,” Robert said, frowning. “So what would he care about the church?”

“I wondered that too,” Edmund said, “But it _must_ be him,” he said, and he told Robert about the snake carved into the leaves that he’d seen atop the pillar. “The snake at the sorting feast, the carving… it has to mean something, doesn’t it?”

“Did it…” Robert frowned, “did it look like an adder?”

“The carving? I suppose so,” Edmund said. “I didn’t get a close look. Why?”

“Just something I’ve been wondering about,” Robert said. “I’ll explain later, I just haven’t…” and he stopped directly in the path, starting to wave his arms.

Edmund stared, wondering what he was doing – but a moment later, a shape stirred in the undergrowth, and suddenly a girl burst forth from the bushes.

She was wearing a long hooded cloak and an excess of silver jewellery. No, he realised, not just _a girl_ emerging from the bushes – Helena, daughter of Rowena Ravenclaw. One of the most influential young witches in all of Hogwarts had just erupted from the forest next to them.

Robert seemed significantly less surprised than Edmund. In fact, Robert and Helena were grinning at each other. “I was beginning to think you hadn’t managed to leave the castle,” Robert said to her. Edmund shifted awkwardly from one foot to another. It felt as though he were not there – neither of them seemed to have any attention to spare him.

“I _said_ I would be by the twisted stump,” she replied. Her hands kept clasping to each other, her fingers tapping against her rings, then separating again.

“I’ve already passed about five twisted stumps,” Robert said. “Maybe that wasn’t the most useful description to give in the forest.” The two of them continued to chatter, and Edmund looked from one of them to the other, and several things quickly became clear to him. Whatever the two of them might be learning in that small classroom off of the scriptorium, it was clear that Latin was only a part of it.

It was not a topic that Edmund had taken much interest in up until now, but fraternisation between young men and women was on the whole rather discouraged at Hogwarts – and that was even when one of their mothers was _not_ the most powerful witch in the land. Marriage was not forbidden, per se – they were not so much a monastery as that – but it was not common. Helga was long widowed before the school had been founded, but none of the other founders had taken a spouse – Helena’s parentage was a mystery that would, perhaps have become a scandal within the community, had anyone dared openly speculate on it. Few who were married lived in the community, and on the whole the life of prayer, study and quiet devotion at Hogwarts seemed to leave little space for courtship or romance.

“I’m sorry,” Edmund said, interrupting, “but we can’t wait anymore. Carwyn will be looking for us if we fall too far behind.” He began to set off down the path, and after a moment, they both followed him. He sighed. _Surely_ Robert was not simply using the one time they were able to talk about Slytherin to plot his… he struggled to find the right word… his _liason_ with someone he already saw nearly every day?

Perhaps Robert sensed some of his mood, because he turned to him. “I’m sorry, Edmund,” he said. “When you said that the forest was a good meeting place for us… Well, I’d already planned to meet Helena here.” He had a strange energy about him: in Helena’s presence, he was nothing like he had been on the hunt. “But I feel like this is for the best,” he said. “Don’t you, Helena?” _What did he mean_? Edmund thought, beginning to feel resentful. Surely he could appreciate that this business was far more serious than whatever tryst he was trying to arrange with the daughter of Rowena Ravenclaw? 

Helena looked Edmund up and down. Despite her youth, there was something in the directness of her gaze that reminded Edmund powerfully of her mother and left him feeling uncomfortably like a stag meeting eyes with its hunter. “It’s Edmund, isn’t it?” she said. “Godric’s boy?” Edmund could not decide how he felt about that description, so, unsure of what to say, he nodded. “Robert’s told me all about you,” she said, as though that should be introduction enough. “It’s a pleasure to make your acquaintance.” She tilted her head, looking at the bags of tools he was carrying. “You said you’re working with Carwyn? I didn’t realise he took apprentices.”

Edmund began to sputter that he was not an _apprentice_ , just helping out for the day, but Robert cut across him. “You see?” He said to Helena, leaving Edmund in the dark again. “It couldn’t have worked out more perfectly.”

Edmund sighed. Carwyn and the rest of the company were hopelessly far ahead, and he felt he could only be half sure they were following on the correct trail at this point. The woods were looming around them, tall and dark, and he had not entirely forgotten Carwyn’s mention of dangerous creatures waiting off the path. He really did not have the patience for any of this. “Robert, what’s _happening_?” He said, and the moment it had left his mouth, he hoped that his tone was not too harsh.

Robert, at least, did not seem to take his outburst badly. “I apologise,” he said. “We’ve both been… well, we’ve been planning for today for so long that I fear we’ve rather left you out of all of the excitement – especially since your presence makes this all that much easier.” Edmund privately reflected that if Robert was trying to apologise for being mysterious, he was doing a particularly bad job of it. “Helena can help us with Salazar, and with finding what he’s doing. And we can help her with what she wants, too.”

Edmund thought. He had no doubt that having someone with Helena’s connections would be an enormous boon to their efforts to uncover what Slytherin was doing – as long as she could be trusted. True, Robert seemed to have every faith in her, and he would normally trust in Robert’s judgement – but there was a distinct possibility that Robert’s reason was compromised right now. It was only Godric who had fallen out with Salazar – Rowena and he still surely kept council. But while this closeness might help Helena have information the two of them desparately wanted, why would Helena trust two excitable young apprentices over her mother’s close friend?

He sighed, and turned to her. “What is it I’m supposed to do for you, Helena?” He had an unpleasant premonition that whatever it was, he wasn’t going to like it.

Helena smiled, her fingers twisting around her rings again. “You’re going to steal me a wand,” she said.


	13. The Amateur, The Apprentice and The Imposter

Edmund blinked; he didn’t know what he’d expected, but it couldn’t possibly have been this. He looked at Helena, walking coolly a few feet away, and at Robert’s relaxed smile.

“Steal you a wand?” he asked. He tried to remember times he had seen Helena around the castle – working in the scriptorium, with her mother, playing the harp at feasts. “I thought you already had a wand?” He asked.

She shrugged. “Oh, I have a _wand_ ,” she said. “But not a _real_ one. Not made by an Ollivander.”

Edmund stared at her, uncomprehending. After a moment’s silence, broken only by their footfalls on the path, Robert said, “Helena and I have been discussing this, while she’s been teaching me.” _I’m sure you have_ , Edmund thought, uncomfortably. When he was alone again with Robert – an occasion that suddenly now seemed even rarer than it had a few minutes ago – he might have to warn him about why it was not wise to be secretly meeting with Rowena Ravenclaw’s daughter. “Helena’s in desparate need of a wand,” Robert continued, “and I can’t say I particularly care for one.”

“You can’t…” Edmund struggled to know what to say. “Robert, you can’t just _not take_ a wand – how will you learn magic?” Robert seemed about to interrupt, but Edmund continued. “And Helena, can’t you just ask Carwyn for a wand, even if you already have one?”

Robert seemed to be raring to go, and Edmund was sure he was about to say that he had done perfectly well learning magic without a wand until now. But before he could begin, Helena held a hand up – and Robert fell silent. “Perhaps it’s better if I explain this from the beginning,” she said.

“Please,” said Edmund.

“I’m sure Robert has told you about the magic he’s learnt to do without a wand,” Helena said. “That’s one way of doing magic, one way to learn – I’m sure that with enough time and as good a teacher as he had, I could learn to do much of what he can.” Robert gave her a begrudging nod. “But there is magic I am learning, magic that I wish to do, and I cannot do it without a wand. A good wand can act like…” she shrugged, “like an icon. A relic.”

“How do you mean?” Robert asked. 

“God can act wherever he pleases, but sometimes it’s easier for us to access his power when it’s channelled through something sacred,” said Helena. “He may heal us wherever and whenever we are, but it may be easier to journey hundreds of leagues to a sacred shinbone, or to a holy well, and that is where the miracle will be performed.” Robert was looking at her sceptically, but Edmund could not help but agree. “Unfortunately, the wand I have is…” she paused, searching for the correct words.

“It was made by lesser craftsmen,” said Robert, and he and Helena shared a smile.

“Where did you even get it from, if it wasn’t made by the Ollivanders?” Edmund interjected. He was having a hard time understanding how this had happened – he could not quite believe that Rowena would allow her daughter to be using a wand so poorly made.

“I made it,” Helena said, so plainly that it took a moment for the words to sink in. Edmund stared at her. “There’s no need to look so impressed,” she said, with just a hint of her mother’s steeliness. “I said it wasn’t a good wand, didn’t I?”

“But if you made your own wand,” Edmund began, “why couldn’t you simply ask Carwyn for another? I’m sure he’d be happy to say he’d made a wand for Rowena’s daughter, after all.”

Helena gave a humourless laugh. “Oh, yes, I’m sure he would – but Mother’s the problem.” She sighed. 

For a moment, the conversation lapsed into silence, and Robert took up the story.“When Helena first learned I could do magic without a wand,” Robert said, with a sympathetic glance at her. “she wasn’t surprised. Rowena has been teaching her all sorts of magic – _all sorts_ , Edmund. Far more than you or I would ever know of. Perhaps even things that Salazar might…”

“I understand,” Edmund said, hurriedly cutting Robert off before he could talk too much of Salazar. He was none too sure he wanted to trust Helena yet with that. Of course, if her and Robert had become as close as they seemed to… he sighed.

“We can’t _rely_ on Carwyn and the other Ollivanders,” Helena said, her voice dropped to a whisper. “That’s what mother always says. They’re not of this place, not really. They spend half the year in London, for God’s sake! What if King Guillame and his court sorcerors were to make them an offer, or to throw the lot of them in the white tower? What if he never came back?”

“I’d hardly be surprised,” said Edmund darkly. He couldn’t imagine Carwyn would stay away from Hogwarts, not if he had a choice, but if the bastard king got it into his mind to keep him in London, who was to say what would happen?

“So for years,” Helena continued, her voice not raising out of the whisper. She hardly needed to stay so quiet– Carwyn and the other of the wandless were almost entirely out of earshot, and it was all Edmund could do to make sure they were still following the same path. “She’s had me studying ancient texts, all sorts of lost scrolls from Constantinople that Salazar has found on his travels.” Edmund and Robert exchanged a significant glance. “She’s been trying to teach me to make our own wands, in case the day comes when Hogwarts doesn’t have a wandsmith.” Her eyes darted between Edmund and Robert, who was nodding encouragingly. “I’ve been making my own wands of my own design since I was ten years old,” she said, and sighed. “But without the proper materials, without the _skills_ that that family has…”

“The wands don’t work?” Edmund asked.

“They work, but not _well_ ,” Helena said. “By now they can cast a spell, can do most of what a real wand would do, but it’s like…” she shrugged. “It’s like trying to weave, but my cloak is wrapped around my hands. I can do everything if I’m careful, and do it very slowly, but it’s a lot more work.” She sighed. “And I do a little wandless magic, but I don’t know anywhere near as much as Robert does. Not even some of the spells that Slytherin can do without a wand…” Edmund looked over at Robert again at the second mention of Slytherin, and found him beaming proudly. Edmund craned his neck to look ahead: he was eager to make sure they didn’t stray too far behind the party. It would be terrible for Carwyn to think he had wandered off. But all the same, the isolation of hanging back gave him the chance to talk more with Robert, and, maybe, to hear what Helena had to say. Her talk was not _about_ Salazar but it seemed to circle him, revealing little details and precious unknown facts like a pig rooting for mushrooms.

“I’ve tried to talk to mother about it,” Helena said. “I’ve tried to tell her that the research she has me doing, the new spells, are never going to happen with a wand I’ve made. I’ve begged her to let me at least apprentice with Carwyn, work under him – but she won’t hear a word of it.”

“And that’s where you come in,” said Robert. He had come up to be walking close to Edmund on his right side, nearly crowding him off the narrow path.

“Where I come in? You didn’t even know I was going to be here until now!” Edmund said.

Robert shrugged. “We’d have worked something out. It’s just _easier_ with your help.”

“Who says I’m helping you?” The words had left Edmund’s mouth before he knew it. “Carwyn’s trusted me to help him with this, do you really think I’m going to…”

Robert reached out a hand, placing it on his arm and trying to calm him. “To help him do what, exactly?” He said. “He’s trusted you to help him make wands for the Baron and a bunch of Norman knights. I wasn’t aware that was such a sacred duty for you.”

“I…” Edmund paused, deflated. Robert was not wrong – if it hadn’t been for a chance to meet with Robert, Edmund would never have agreed to help Carwyn in the first place. He sighed. “What do you want me to do?”

*******

The grove lay at the heart of the dark forest: a wide clearing, dappled with sunlight. For miles around it, close-clustered trees arched into a canopy that stretched for miles. The trees of the woods around Hogwarts were ancient, tall, resplendent. But in the centre of this clearing stood a small group of trees, evenly spaced, and next to these trees, the trees of the dark forest were like malnourished saplings.

Each tree in the clearing stood alone, not a leaf touching its neighbour. Each tree was a different type: Edmund saw yew, saw elder, saw holly, ash, beech, oak, an apple tree with the last of its late blossom dying, and more trees, strange trees that he couldn’t name. But he barely had an eye for the trees’ strange leaves and strong boughs. How could he, when each and every tree, each limb, each branch, shimmered with life? Tiny creatures, barely a blur and yet shaped like a man, swarmed over each of them in a constant blur of movement.

“Witches of Hogwarts,” Carwyn said. Something of the space around them, the high arching boughs of trees, the quiet and the strong resonance of Carwyn’s voice, reminded Edmund of the chapel at Hogwarts. _This is far grander than anything Slytherin will ever make_ , he thought, and the thought helped quell some of his uneasiness about what he was here to do. He found himself bowing his head. 

“You are here in the sacred grove of the wandwood,” Carwyn continued, “to take part in this most sacred ritual. You arrive today as the unwanded, adrift in the seas of magic. But I will leave with the beginnings of a wand, made to suit the magic of each of you by the craft that has been handed down in my family for generations.” A breeze began to run through the woods, and Edmund heard the whisper of the leaves rustling with each other. Not only the leaves: the tiny creatures on the trees, the teeming life, seemed to somehow be chattering, talking. It was not only the witches that responded to Carwyn’s speech.

“With these wands,” the man continued, “you will know power – true arcane power, that grants the ability to reshape our world as you wish.” Edmund dared to look up, for just a moment. He saw Carwyn standing straight and tall, the sunlight setting him aglow. He saw Robert, nervous, his fist bunched tight around the precious secret. He saw Baron Malet, jaw set in determination, and he looked away. “This all begins today,” Carwyn said, “with this gift. Please, use it well.”

Carwyn was moving now, and in the stillness, the crunch of each footfall in the fallen leaves carried. Edmund felt a gentle touch on his shoulder: Carwyn was beckoning him to join him. “Is it time?” Edmund whispered. He looked over again at Robert, wondering once more if this was really what the boy wanted.

“It is,” Carwyn said in a low tone. “Bring me the bag – take the knife.” Edmund rummaged through the bags, cursing silently at how their contents had shifted in the long journey here.

“The trees of this grove are not any tree,” Carwyn said, once again speaking to the whole clearing. His voice carried like the chapel bell at Hogwarts, and Edmund found himself wondering if there was a magic in it. “These woods are blessed,” Carwyn continued, “by the spirits that live in them. Their wood has magical potential, and the spirits feed from the tree, and the tree feeds from the spirits.” Edmund had found a roll of leather that wrapped the blade of the silver knife: he unrolled it, grasping a handle of bone, and lifted it gingerly. He looked up at Carwyn, and followed his outstretched arm to the sacred wandwood trees. Sometimes, one of the spirits would stay still long enough that he could get a good look at it, just for a moment. They were tiny creatures, shaped more like a man than any other animal but with wood instead of fur, and sprouting into fresh green leaves at the top. If he blinked or looked away for even a second, they were indistinguishable from the trees they dwelled on. The spirits looked out at the assembled witches with black, beady eyes – and in a moment, they were gone, simply another part of the twist of trunk and branch. “We are taking the wood they have so kindly prepared for us,” Carwyn said, “and so since we take something, we will be giving something as well. My assistant,” he said, waving an arm at Edmund, who felt very strange being referred to with such a term, “will take a lock of hair from each of you. The spirits will take your gift. Whichever spirit accepts the lock of hair, I will cut the wood for your wand from that tree.”

Carwyn spread a variety of tools in front of him to cut wood – saws, sickles, knives and hatchets. Runes decorated the handles, or the blades glimmered in strange metals. Edmund gripped the knife tightly, the bone cool in his hand, and set to work. He would go to someone and they would proffer a lock of hair – he would cut it with the gleaming blade of the knife and bring it back to Carwyn. Each time, Carwyn stood before the grove, a hand outstretched. Moments would pass, but before long, one of the tiny creatures, the spirits of the wood, would climb down from the tree and cautiously make their way to him. They would take the hair from his outstretched hand, would snatch it – and Carwyn would follow them back to their tree. He would cut a small branch, a short length of wood, and laid each neatly on the ground before him. Quite how he remembered which wood was whose was entirely beyond Edmund: when he had had his wand made, it had been just Carwyn, himself, and Alfric, younger and still clear-eyed, in the clearing.

It was a strange feeling, moving from person to person, performing the same actions at each. It was stranger because the Normans could hardly look him in the eye. Not that this was anything new – but rather than disdain or disinterest, there was something meek and unquestioning in the way each witch let him take a lock of hair. His hands might be shaking a little grasping the knife, but it slowly became clear – they _respected_ him. Men easily twice his age respected him, perhaps even feared him. It seemed that something of the wonder, of the mystery, of this sacred space, of Carwyn and his rituals had rubbed off on Edmund. 

He began to settle into a rhythm. Go to someone, cut a lock of hair – sometimes with a few mumbled words, often without, back to Carwyn, and wait for the beginnings of the wand to be cut. Sometimes, he would try to catch Robert’s eye, to double check with him that he should still go ahead with Helena’s madcap plan – but Robert was determinedly looking downwards, his fist bunched tightly. Edmund looked over at him, wishing he could just talk to him again – maybe he’d be able to persuade him out of this. Surely there was another way for Helena to… he shook his head, willing himself to focus, and looked up at the next witch whose hair he would be cutting – only to meet with the grey eyes of the Baron.

Baron Malet stared coolly at Edmund, unblinking. Edmund hated to be the one to look away, hated to give the man even that as a victory – but he had a job to do. Other men had inclined their heads – some had even kneeled – so that Edmund was able to better perform his duty. Some had even offered a lock of hair to him – the Baron simply stood, tall, looking down at Edmund imperiously.

Edmund reached up, willing his hands to stop shaking. He grasped a fistful of the Baron’s hair, and roughly hewed at it with the knife. The corners of Baron Malet’s mouth turned up in a sneer, but Edmund was determined not to look. Instead, he fixed his eyes on the silver blade – and a sudden, terrible thought came rushing to him. _The knife is so close_ , he thought. _So close to his throat. This man does not deserve a wand. You could slip. One movement, one unhappy accident..._ He sighed, nearly letting the Baron’s dark curls drop to the forest floor as he tried vainly to hold the hair in place, cut it, and take the fallen hair without Baron Malet’s help. He would have honour. He would not take a life, not outside the battlefield, not in this sacred place. The worst he would do to Baron Malet was to unevenly hack at his hair – and even that, he thought, would be more the Baron’s fault than his own.

 _Besides_ , said a treacherous voice he tried to ignore as he carried the hair to Carwyn. _You’d have no appetite for it on the battlefield either, would you? You can’t even go on a hunt: what makes you think you could kill a man, even a Norman?_ He had the hair now – he turned and walked back to Carwyn, trying to feel as though he were calmly continuing with the task given to him and not like he was fleeing. A part of Edmund wanted to tarry. He wanted the very spirits of the wood, the guardians of magic in this sacred place, to reject the Baron and leave him wandless. He wanted to watch that happen. But there were scant few witches left now – it was not long until Edmund would come to Robert.

Before long, he approached the boy. He looked furtively around the clearing, trying to make sure they were unobserved. They were. Edmund had handed Carwyn the hair from a wiry old soldier, and a small, gnarled tree spirit was slowly making its way to Carwyn’s outstretched hand. All eyes of the clearing seemed to be on its slow progress.

“Are you sure about this?” Edmund asked. “Now you’re here, after Carwyn’s speech, are you still…”

Robert shrugged. “You might be forgetting that not all of us speak Latin,” he said. “Whatever he said, I could barely follow.” Edmund began to speak, but Robert smiled. “It doesn’t matter anyway,” he said. “I’m ready,” he said.

“But without a wand,” Edmund began in a hurried whisper, “you’ll never be able to-“

“Maybe I don’t want to,” Robert said. “Edmund, _take it_.”

Edmund stuck the knife through his belt, Robert opened his fist. Inside, still holding its curls despite how tightly Robert had been crushing it, was one of the long, black curls of Helena Ravenclaw.

Time was running out for him to talk to Robert without raising suspicion. He would just have to trust him. Edmund took a deep breath and grasped the hair.

The spirit Carwyn had been dealing with had taken the hair now, taken it and allowed Carwyn to cut a length of wood he set carefully down on the forest floor with the others.

He handed Carwyn the hair. “That’s the last of them,” he said quickly, hoping to distract Carwyn from looking at it too long and realising just how short Robert’s hair was in comparison.

“It’s taken long enough,” Carwyn said with a sigh. He reached the hand out, an invitation to the spirits, but it seemed an unthinking gesture by now. He’d offered so many gifts today that all sense of ritual, all holiness, had slowly been worn down. “I’d wanted to be in England for the solstice, but I’m going to have my work cut out for me whittling all of these and still having time to travel.” Edmund nodded, and a lone creature crept from the trees to take Helena’s curls from Carwyn’s hands. It was quick, hopping from foot to foot – nothing like the slow, old creature he’d been watching before.

“Elm,” Carwyn noted conversationally. Around them, the clearing was slowly starting to break into small, quiet conversations – it seemed the spell was beginning to wear off.

“You can tell by looking at them?” Edmund asked.

“If you know the spirits well enough,” Carwyn said. He smiled wearily. “I remember being a child on my father’s knee in this grove. He’d summon flowers or find insects for the spirits, one at a time, and I’d have to name each of them.”

Edmund looked at the brown, gnarled body of the creature, picking its way back up the trunk of one of the trees. Carwyn was stretching himself out, reaching for a sickle and readying himself to follow the creature. “Do all trees have a spirit, then?” He asked, curious.

“Yes and no,” Carwyn said. He assessed the tree before him, holding a slender length of a branch out with his left hand and cutting at it with the sickle with his right. “Every tree has a spirit, at least for a while. Not just every tree: every rock, every stone, every brook. They might have many names, but the world is full of magic, Edmund, full of magic’s creatures.” Green sap was dripping down the bright blade of the sickle, individual droplets beading and falling down to the ground. “But they can be fleeting, and hard to find,” Carwyn said through gritted teeth. “It takes an old tree to harbour as many as this, a tree that has known magic for years and drunk it up through root and leaf.” The branch came free, and without looking, he tossed it to Edmund, who was rather startled when he reached out, without thinking, and caught it. His mind had hardly been on the clearing: the germ of an idea was beginning to form in his mind. Maybe later, if he could just talk to Robert about it, they might finally be able to make some progress on their original quest.

“You can’t make a wand without using wood from a tree with the spirits in,” Carwyn said conversationally. Edmund tried to listen, not to think about the idea glistening like a snowflake in his head. It was beautifully formed, but he was worried that if he touched it or inspected it too closely, it would melt and be gone forever. He looked up at Carwyn, who was still working at the tree. Another of the spirits was walking, bandy-legged, across the bough he had just taken the wood for Helena’s wand from. It inspected the fresh cut, and Carwyn reached a hand down into the leafmould, pulling something up to toss to the creature. It caught it in its tiny hands, and, delighted, scampered back up the trunk. 

“It’s lucky the trees are so close to Hogwarts,” Edmund said. Even with bearing the indignities of the Baron, there was something he enjoyed about today, about this new role he had where many of the Normans seemed to fear him, just a little, and where Carwyn talked to him like an equal. It felt a world away from the hunt. “Or else how would any of us get our wands?”

Carwyn laughed. “Luck’s not a part of it! You’re missing a part of the story there,” he said, turning back to walk to the centre of the clearing.

“What do you mean?” Edmund asked.

“You really think that _this_ …” Carwyn waved his hands around to show the clearing in the dark forest, the spirit trees stretching towards the sky, “was all chance? One of each tree, no more, no less?” Edmund nodded; this felt too planned. “No, there have been witches working this land since long before Hogwarts. Before my family came to Britain. Before the time of Christ, even.” He took the stick from Edmund, lying it on the ground with the others: different woods, different lengths, some with old, flaking grey bark and some so young they were almost green. “Two score years ago,” Carwyn continued, brushing his hands against his breeches, “when the founders first chose to build Hogwarts, Helga’s son gifted her this land to build the school on, precisely _because_ of the trees here so that the wands might be made for generations of future witches. Luckily, my father was in that first group of witches who made the journey North from England to learn, and he was able to start to make wands for the community.” He sighed. “Amateurs will try sometimes, but without the proper knowledge…” he sighed. “It’s not pretty.”

Edmund swallowed, trying to fight down a rising feeling that Carwyn _knew_. He couldn’t, of course – how would anything as strange as the request Helena had made? – but all the same, his stomach tightened into an anxious knot. “So what’s next?” He asked, wanting to move the topic of conversation on from botched attempts to make wands as quickly as possible. “You turn the wood, polish it…?”

Carwyn gave him a long, approving look. “That’s the start,” he said. “And then of course, I have to insert the tail hair…”

“The tail hair?”

Carwyn nodded. “Unicorns,” he said. “Every few years, my father will go on pilgrimage to the holy land, find the herds there, and bring us enough hairs to last.” He sighed, and Edmund tried to imagine a life where a unicorn was something to speak of so matter-of-factly.

“I’ve been telling him I wish we could introduce a breeding herd to the forest here – it’d be so much easier…” Carwyn shook his head. “The magic of the wandwood is one thing, but it’s at its strongest when we can combine it with a part of a magical creature. Once we have them combined, there’s spells we cast, and then…” He gave Edmund that strange look again, as if he were appraising him and pleased with what he saw. “All these questions, Edmund,” he said. Was this it? Did he know? “I was wondering…” Carwyn said, and Edmund braced himself. “I was going to ask this anyway,” Carwyn continued, he trailed off, before starting again in a flurry of words. “I don’t suppose you’d ever be interested in apprenticing with the Ollivanders, Edmund?”

“Me?” Edmund asked. “Oh, but I couldn’t-“

“Of course you could,” said Carwyn, looking at him seriously. “You’re a bright lad who’s taking an interest, and you’ve been more than helpful today. Besides,” he said, picking up the bag of tools and gesturing with it, “don’t think I haven’t noticed the spell you did on this. Without your wand? That’s the sort of magical mind we need.”

Edmund blushed. There was so much he needed to say – that this was so far from what he was expecting. That it wasn’t _him_ who had cast that spell without a wand. That he barely knew the first thing about casting a spell without his wand.

“In London?” It wasn’t the question he had meant to – it felt as though another voice entirely had risen up from within him, considering an offer he had not had time to understand.

“Or here,” Carwyn said. “Probably both, like me – you could learn with me here while I fashioned the wands for Hogwarts, could see the workshop at the Thames and the work my father does for the sorcerers at court…”

Edmund’s mind raced. It was true that not everyone stayed at Hogwarts, but he had never given any thought to what he would do if he were to leave. He had not even begun to dream that an offer to apprentice outside of the castle would come from anyone, least of all Carwyn. For all that Carwyn Ollivander might be a relaxed presence within the ranks of Gryffindors men, it was known to everyone that his father was something of a tyrant, and that they horded the secrets of their wandlore closely: after all, why else would Helena be having such a hard time crafting her own wand? And why would her mother be so keen on learning how to make them without having to rely on a family who split their time between Hogwarts and the king’s court? 

“I don’t know…” He said, slowly. He truly didn’t. He had a horrible, selfish thought that he was glad that Alfric was not here. If Alfric heard him made an offer such as this, the old man would be so grateful, so proud, that Edmund did not know if he would have been able to even consider turning it down.

“Just promise me you’ll think about it,” Carwyn said. “Because the thing is, Edmund…” he shook his head. “Like I said, you’re a bright lad and a good witch. You’re a credit to Godric and a credit to Hogwarts. But I can tell…” He sighed, and for a second, Edmund looked around to see if there was something wrong with the clearing. “I can tell you’re not _happy_ , Edmund.”

“I…” Edmund flushed, “That’s not true!”

“Please,” said Carwyn. “When I was your age, Edmund, I had _friends_ here. We would have fun, we would run out from class and disappoint our masters and get beaten, we would snatch apples from the kitchens, we would _live_. But when I see you… you’re alone.”

“I have Alfric,” Edmund said without thinking – and the moment it was out of his mouth, he realised how pathetic it sounded.

“And he is a great man and a worthy companion,” said Carwyn, laying a reassuring hand on his arm. “But I’m not sure if a half-blind old man is exactly the sort of companion you _need,_ Edmund. And Godric’s a great wizard, and a good friend of mine, but…” He sighed. “You’re too young to spend your life traipsing around after two old men who are bitter about wars long lost, and that’s all I’ll say on that.”

Edmund nodded, unsure what he could say that wouldn’t betray him. A horrible feeling in the pit of his stomach told him that Carwyn was far from wrong. But the funny thing was that, right now, he _had_ a friend at Hogwarts. He wasn’t going to mention it to Carwyn, not now, but he had Robert. He might even, if she could truly be trusted, have Helena – although he felt far less sure on that count. He wasn’t sure that the three of them would be snatching apples any time soon, but he was sure that the swap of Helena’s hair for Robert’s was _more_ than enough mystery to earn any of them a beating.

Carwyn smiled, taking Edmund’s silence for agreement. “You don’t have to know,” he said, “not yet. And listen, Edmund – it’s just a thought, there’s no need to rush.” He began packing the bundles of sticks away, the tools, and Edmund placing each blade and tool into a series of complicated pockets and sheaths while barely having to look. “One day,” he said, smiling wryly, “I will finish these wands, and I _will_ be able to hand them to their rightful owners and begin the journey south.” He sighed. “My hopes of arriving for the solstice look quite forlorn now. But I _will_ go eventually, and I will spend the summer there – perhaps even the autumn. But my point, Edmund, is that there are months before I will even be back in Hogwarts, and perhaps _then_ , when you have had some time to think, we can talk about you working with the Ollivanders as an apprentice.”

Edmund nodded. It was a wonderful offer. It was a great deal of time to think it over. But there was something about the image of himself in London, having to smile, and nod, and make wands and do magic in the court of a false king, that he could not bear for even a moment.

He sighed. “Thank you,” he said, doing his best to sound as though he meant it.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Well, here it is: the chapter that took me so many different tries to write that it stopped me updating the fic for a few months. Hopefully you'll think the end result was worth it.
> 
> The biggest change in an earlier version of this was having the unicorn herd already in the forest, and a part of the ritual where Edmund was cutting their tail hairs. It was getting very bogged down and wasn't doing much for the plot - once I cut the unicorns, it made a huge difference and I was able to finish the chapter very quickly.


	14. Every Stone, Tree and Brook

“Carwyn said something interesting,” Edmund said.

Edmund, Robert and Helena were walking back through the forest to the castle. Edmund had made sure to linger in the clearing, and had managed to shake Carwyn off so that he could talk with Robert – and it had seemed like they had barely been on the path a moment when Helena had flitted out of the shadows, full of excitement for the successful trick they had played. Edmund found himself surprised by how easily the three of them fit together. All the same, he wished he could be having this conversation with just Robert.

“Interesting how?” Helena asked. She seemed just as animated in excitement as she had been in distress, and was nearly bounding along the path. “Was it about the wands?”

“No,” Edmund said. “Well, not exactly. He told me a little of how they’re made, but…” Helena had a dozen questions on everything from the tools used to cut the wood to what Carwyn would use as a core, all coming rapid-fire, one after another, and Edmund did his best to wave them off. “I thought you didn’t _need_ to learn to make a wand anymore?” He asked.

“Sorry,” she said with a smile. “Force of habit. After years of trying to finally make one good enough…”

Edmund squinted at her. Was all of this part of some scheme? She had as much as said that her mother had instructed her to learn the Ollivanders’ secrets in making a wand. Carwyn had trusted him with some of the secrets of his trade, and he did not know if he should share them, not with Helena.

“What was it?” Robert asked. “That Carwyn said?” Edmund suddenly realised that he had stayed silent a moment too long, and Helena was looking at him strangely.

“Well...” Even aside from any family secrets in wandcrafting, there was much that Carwyn had said that he was not ready to share, even with Robert. But he had had an idea when he was talking with Carwyn, and that idea had had time to put down roots and begin to grow. “When we first met, Robert, we talked about…” He tried to pick his words carefully, unsure what it was safe to reveal, “keeping an eye on… certain things.”

“Like Salazar?” Helena said. Edmund looked over, surprised, but her face didn’t have any malice in it. “Or the Baron?”

Robert laughed. “Both, really,” he said. “She knows, Ed.” 

Edmund’s stomach did a complicated flip. On the one hand, he was uncomfortable with just how easy Robert was to trust Helena. But on the other hand, Robert had called him Ed. Not even Alfric called him Ed anymore. It was the name of his childhood, but more than that – it was the name that Hilda and Osbert had used to call him, back in Northumbria. It was something he was called by friends.

“She does?” He turned to Helena. “You do? Great.” He tried to mean it. “Well… I was thinking that we might be able to keep an eye on Salazar – on both of them, really, him and the Baron – by calling up the spirits of the castle.”

“The spirits of the castle?” Robert frowned. “The castle has spirits?” He paused. “You mean like… ghosts?”

Helena laughed. “Of course not,” she said. “Everyone knows there’s no such thing. ” She turned to Edmund. “Do you mean like the green man?” Edmund and Robert both looked at her blankly. “The green men!” She said. “The woodland spirits we saw today, the ones in the grove.”

“ _That’s_ what those were?” said Robert. Edmund stared at him, but the boy shrugged. “I don’t speak Latin, I didn’t know – I thought perhaps Carwyn had cast a spell on the trees to bring them to life.”

“No,” Edmund said, “he told me that everything around us has spirits. That’s what he said – a spirit of some kind lives in every stone, every tree and every brook.”

Helena considered this for a moment, kicking a stone along the path. “That’s true,” she said, “in a fashion. Mother tells enough stories about the old country. The way the mist clings to the hills…” She gave the stone another long kick and it tumbled, end over end, down the path. Her face had a strange expression, one Edmund could barely understand at first – but then he recognised it. He was sure he felt much the same sometimes, when he remembered the river banks of Northumbria and the way the trees there had turned to gold in the autumn. In her heart, Helena was in very different woods to these. Edmund felt a pang of sympathy for her. Helena had, in all the years he had been there, never left Hogwarts. Had she ever set foot in the lands she talked of so fondly? _Was it worse_ , he thought, _to miss dearly a land you had had to leave? Or never to have known the land that you loved at all?_

“The land’s full of spirits there,” Helena continued. “The green man in the wood, the _Ceffyl Dŵr_ in the well… I always thought it was just the land, that _specific_ land, but what if it’s everywhere?” She paused, lost in thought and nearly stopping on the track. “But then, apart from today… I hate to say this, but I’ve lived in Hogwarts my whole life, Edmund, and I’ve never seen any spirits. Not in the castle.”

“They’re not just…” Edmund trailed off, trying to remember exactly what Carwyn had said. “You need to be able to draw them out,” he said. “He said there’s magic for it, to… bring them forth. To awaken them. Though I don’t know what it is.”

“But everything you listed is _natural_ ,” Robert said, aiming a kick of his own at Helena’s pebble and sending it skittering into the undergrowth. “I’m sure _that_ stone might have a spirit – and I apologise to it – but I don’t think castles would have spirits, not in the same way that a forest or a rock would.”

“That’s just it, though,” said Edmund. “He said _every stone_.”

“And?”

“And what’s a castle but hundreds and thousands of stones, all pieced together?”

Helena considered, slowing down so much for a moment that she almost came to a stop. “So you’re saying that we can summon the spirits of the stones that make up Hogwarts?”

“Yes! Well, I’m not sure. But I think it’s worth a go. Not just the stones, either: the wood and the trees used to build it too,” said Edmund, “the water of the moat, too – anything like that.”

“It shouldn’t work…” Helena said slowly. “After all, when Mother and the others built it… well, they’re not _real_ stones.”

“They feel real enough to me,” said Robert.

“They’re real now,” Helena continued, “but they weren’t _quarried_. The wood here isn’t from grown trees, it was created. Summoned from nothing, like the stone and everything else. The magic is incredible, but they’re not…” Suddenly, another thought seemed to strike her, and she was a lightningbolt of movement again, striding ahead so far that Edmund and Robert had to struggle to keep up. “But then again,” she said, “if we’re talking about a spirit of magic, and we’re talking about materials that were _born_ of magic, perhaps it would be even easier to summon them. Perhaps more spirits would live there.” She turned around to the two of them, face flushed. “I think we could do it,” she said. “Maybe.”

Robert looked thoughtful. “That’s a big maybe.”

“We’d have to do a lot of research. Read through the library, and maybe also things that weren’t written down.” Helena sighed. “We might able to make some enquiries, I mean. If only I could ask Mother, but…”

“Absolutely not,” Edmund said, so quickly he hardly had time to think before the words left his mouth. Immediately after he said it, a silence fell between them, and he could feel that it had been a mistake.

Helena looked at him coolly. “Of course I wouldn’t,” she said. “I can’t tell my mother I’m getting a wand for myself: do you really think I’d trust her with secrets about another of the founders?” Edmund looked away, because Helena’s eyes were blazing now, burning with a fire that had certainly come from her mother, and he could not meet them. “Yes, my mother is close with Salazar,” she said. “Is that what you wanted to hear? I don’t know a thing about where in the castle he goes when no one sees him for months, but she certainly seems to. There. That’s what you’ve been thinking, isn’t it? You’ve been wondering why I, Rowena’s daughter, would want to help you spy on another of the founders?”

Edmund still couldn’t meet her eye. “I’m sorry,” he said. “I didn’t mean…” He paused, unsure exactly what he had meant. He had been wondering _what_ , exactly, she would get out of this, but this hardly seemed the time to mention that. The silence hang heavy between them, and he was aware of Robert standing, watching them both, saying nothing. “I just didn’t know if I could trust you,” Edmund said finally.

Helena shook her head slowly. “ _You_ didn’t know if you could trust me?”

“Well…”

“What, you think I’m going to go from here and run to Mother? Tell her all about how you’re planning on enchanting the castle to spy on Slytherin?” Edmund said nothing, but risked a nod. He didn’t know if Helena had even seen it or not – she continued regardless. Some of the energy seemed to have sapped from her, and she seemed a little deflated – more sad than angry, now. “My mother might know where Salazar is in the castle and how he spends his days, but I see no more of him than anyone else at Hogwarts. And as for letting a word of this slip to Slytherin, _I’ve_ never liked him. The man brings out the worst kinds of magic in Mother.” She shivered, and seemed to shrink back into the cloak she had wrapped around herself. “You weren’t the only one in the chapel when Godric and Salazar duelled, Edmund. I remember. And then with everything that Robert told me, too?” She shook her head. “There’s no fear I’m breathing a word of this, and you’ll just have to believe me on that.”

Edmund considered. “I’ll try,” he said – and immediately, Helena’s reaction made it clear that it had been the wrong thing to say. 

“You’ll try?” She said. “This is the first time I’ve met you, Edmund, and I’ve trusted you to know that I am going behind my mother’s back to have a wand made for me against her express instructions. And I’m trusting you because Robert does, but Robert’s only met you once before today. And both of us are doing a good deal more than just _trying_!” She turned to Robert. “Edmund seems able to trust _you_ just fine,” she said.

Robert threw his hands up. “Don’t say that like it’s a bad thing,” he said.

“I’m sorry,” Edmund began, but Helena continued and cut across him.

“I’m not saying it’s bad,” she said. “But the point is that you’ve chosen to trust each other. Robert, you’ve trusted both of us with the fact that you’re wary of the Baron, and with your suspicions about Slytherin. Edmund, you’ve trusted him with the same. I’ve chosen to trust both of you with the fact that I’m going behind my mother’s back for…” she waved her hands vaguely at the woods around her, “all of this. So maybe, Edmund, you can _choose_ to trust me not to immediately go running to Mother and to Salazar with this.”

There was a long silence, only broken by three sets of feet trudging through forest paths. “You’re right,” Edmund said finally. “Helena, I’m sorry.” He thought back to his conversation with Carwyn. “It’s been… I’ve not been used to making friends at Hogwarts.”

Helena nodded. “I haven’t either,” she said, with a sigh. “Mother’s kept me busy enough to see to that. So I can understand.”

Robert shrugged. “I don’t know what the two of you are talking about,” he said. “I’ve barely been here a month, and I’ve already made two friends. Where’s the difficulty?”

Everyone laughed, and some of the tension hanging over the forest path seemed to have broken. “Well,” said Helena, and her face had softened, and she seemed to be back to her habit of nervously twisting the ring on one finger, “I’ll say no more about it.” Edmund nodded. “But I think that between the three of us, and with a lot of work, we can do this. And I’m in,” Helena said, “if you’re in.”

Edmund nodded. “I’m in,” he said.

“Always have been,” said Robert.

***

By the time the three of them arrived at the castle, it was clear to Edmund that Carwyn was not right anymore: now, he had two firm friends at Hogwarts. Once he was able to get past his unease about Helena’s family ties, he had to admit that there were definite advantages to having Rowena Ravenclaw’s daughter owing you a favour. After Edmund had first met Robert, it had taken weeks to be able to see him again and continue on in their quest. But now, he was suddenly furnished with the perfect excuse to see him every day. The day after the wand ceremony, the scriptorium master had pulled Edmund away from copying a particularly dull treatise on the magic of the sorcerors of Augustus Caesar – instead, he was lead to a small anteroom off of the scriptorium where Helena and Robert were waiting with a stack of books nearly half his height, fresh parchment to take notes, and near boundless time to discuss the finer points of different summoning spells.

Ever since Edmund had been able to set quill to parchment, the scriptorium had taken up the bulk of the daylight hours he spent at Hogwarts. Oh, there were times when older witches and masters would teach spells to him and other youths, but it felt as though the majority of the magic he was able to cast had been learned entirely by accident, scraps of magical knowledge and instruction that he picked up copying page after page of text for the ever growing library of Hogwarts. But this was the first time that he had ever taken those books _out_ of the library, had ever purposefully looked for information rather than devouring whatever scraps got thrown his way like a hound hovering around the table at a feast. Every day, Helena would bring a stack of books, and she and Edmund would pore over any mention they could possibly find of spirits of wood and stone, their origins, and of how to bring them forth. Robert, who could still not read well enough to be of much use searching in books, would sit copying some Latin text and working on his hand, and would occasionally chime in when Edmund and Helena shared what they had learned.

“This isn’t going anywhere,” Edmund groaned, closing _On the Magic of the Black Forest._ “Plenty on kobolds and hill trolls, which I suppose might be some kind of very big spirit, but I think the author’s a lot more interested in how to fight them and or trick them than how to summon them.”

Robert looked up from a sheet of parchment, a quill gripped inexpertly between his fingers. Edmund tried to remember back to his own days of learning to write. Was the speed Robert’s writing was progressing at normal, or had something slowed down his acquisition of letters, of Latin? In his afternoons in the anteroom, he hadn’t spotted anything particularly untoward between the two of them. Nothing _bad_. But sometimes he would see a glance linger, and he had an uneasy feeling of intruding on something, however unwise that something might be. “If we summoned a troll from the stones of Hogwarts,” Robert said, “I think Salazar _might_ have an idea that it was following him.” Edmund laughed. “Some things you don’t need book learning for.”

Helena had hardly reacted: she was frowning at a scroll in an alphabet Edmund did not recognise, unrolled across a table before them. “Boggarts,” she said, frowning.

“I’m sorry?” Robert said, looking curious at her. For a moment, Edmund wondered the same thing –and then a memory came crashing over him, and he felt himself dragged back a decade.

“Boggarts are… they’re a little devil. A bad creature,” he said. He could see Granny’s hut, with her warming her old bones by the fire as she told the story of the farmer who’d had a boggart in his field in the next village. “They sour the milk, and take the crops, and scare the children.” It had only been a few months ago that Alfric had first come to the village, and before he and Godwin had found out that Alfric used to be a soldier, the strange, battleworn old man had scared them so much that they had wondered in hushed tones if he was a boggart himself. “I thought they were just a story,” he said to Helena, frowning. “Something to stop me from running off where my Granny couldn’t see me.”

“My mother used to tell me that the elves would take me away if I didn’t finish my porridge,” Robert said with a smile, “but I’m not sure we need to spend too much time on that.”

“Well, Kentigern wrote about the boggarts here,” Helena said, ignoring Robert’s comment. “And listen to this.” As she read, Edmund could not help but notice the way that Robert’s eyes were fixed on her face, hanging on her every word, despite his disinterest in the conversation moments ago. “I came then to the village of Mumby, in the country of Mercia, where the godly people had been much troubled by a bogle, which they did call a boggart. A peculiar spirit, it will form from the stones of a ruined house that has known not love nor care, and without the proper care to banish it will cause all manners of fear and tribulations to good Christian folk.” She skimmed through the text. “There’s a lot here about the problems the boggart was causing, making the sheepdogs of the village go lame, stealing away a child, driving an old woman mad with fright…” she turned a page. “But look, it says again that it is a creature born of an abandoned cottage, where the tumbled stones will give it shape and it will haunt and create havoc…” She shut the book, looking around at the two of them. After neither of them said anything, she asked, “Don’t you see?”

Edmund shook his head. “I suppose a boggart is a spirit, but I can’t say this makes me want to summon one.”

But something seemed to be slowly dawning in Robert’s eyes. “No,” he said, “not the boggart specifically, but that it’s born of the house…”

“Exactly!” said Helena. “Buildings can have spirits! Not just that, but the shape of the stones themselves, the way they are assembled, give them life – it’s exactly the information we needed.”

Edmund exhaled. “And if a place that’s ruined gives a bad spirit, perhaps Hogwarts will give us something less malevolent,” he said. He shuddered. He’d had plenty of nightmares about boggarts that one winter, and it felt strange to know that something he’d long dismissed as a childhood story was real.

“There’s something else…” Robert said. His quill was set down now, any pretence at attempting to study long abandoned. “Something…” He squinted, trying to concentrate. “If the shape of the stones themselves has magical properties, isn’t that like the adder stone?”

Edmund sat bolt upright. “The adder stone? Is Slytherin…” Helena and Robert explained together what Robert had learned in the same room back when he first started his reading lessons: that it was nothing to do with Slytherin, but that adder stones were their own particular class of stone, and that they had some of their own magic to them, and that a Grand Adder Stone stood beneath London, a passage between life and death itself.

Edmund nodded slowly. He couldn’t deny that he was disappointed – all of this felt like they were barely any closer to finding out what Slytherin was up to, and he was hoping that this adder stone, however interesting it was, might hold the key. Instead, he was left to consider the terrible possibilities of what Guillame the Bastard might want with a magical power like that.

“The shape of those stones gives them their magical powers, too,” Robert said. “That’s what you were saying when we first talked about it.”

“I suppose so,” Helena said.

“Well,” said Robert. “It seems to me – and I, of course, haven’t been able to read all of these books, so I might be wrong – that the _shape_ of things is what’s important. The shape of the stones, and wood, and clay, and everything else that makes a building is enough to make a new spirit from them, not just a spirit of the rock. The shape of an adder stone gives it some magic, even a grand adder stone.”

“And?” Edmund asked. He dug his heel along a groove between flagstones in the floor, wondering what magic the shape of this room might be making.

“We can’t be the first people to realise this,” Robert said. “Whether it’s in the library here or not, I’m sure that other witches have made a study of the magical properties of shaping stone.” He paused, and something in the look in his eye helped Edmund realise where he was going. “If Salazar is shaping all of Hogwarts…” Robert said, trailing off and letting the horrible possibilities hang in the air.

No one said anything. Edmund stared into the heart of a candle flame, watching the flicker of white heat and hoping it might provide some sort of answer. “So the new chapel…” He said.

“Maybe,” Robert said with a shrug. “I don’t know. How would we?” He turned to Helena. “Do you think your mother would know anything?”

“I don’t know,” said Helena. “Even if she did, I don’t know what…” She paused for a long time. “Well,” she said finally, “we’re not going to find out by wondering.” There was a cold iron in her voice now, and Edmund wondered if he imagined that she was gripping the edge of the volume in front of her a little tighter. Had that whiteness in her knuckles been there before? “We’d best get to work,” said Helena.

***

The three of them set to their task with a quiet, determined new vigour. But however dusty the tomes Helena brought from the library, however fragile the scrolls they pored over, there was nothing they could find about the architectural magic they were wondering about, and almost as little about the conjuring of spirits.

Somehow, the books and the mission began to slowly take over the rest of Edmund’s life, creeping in like weeds, setting down root, and flourishing. He grew steadily more and more distracted in mass, unable to properly devote himself to prayer – instead, he would try to take in as much of the room as he could without moving his head, wondering what spells could be laced into the stone. Salazar had wanted to seize the throne of Britain at the head of an army of the dead. Was anything really beyond him? Sometimes, as Edmund walked the corridors of Hogwarts, he imagined that the whole castle was an arcane sigil, some part of the strange rune magic that Helena and Robert would argue about as he pored over books in the little anteroom off the scriptorium. All of Hogwarts was one enormous rune, and with each footfall he and every other witch were activating and channeling its magical power - if he could just view it from the right angle, he would see it glow and understand its power.

When Edmund lay on his straw mattress at night, pages of inscrutable magical text danced behind his eyes, taunting him as he tried to fall asleep. Alfric began to ask pointed, concerned questions about whether Edmund had got enough sleep, and the new project that Rowena Ravenclaw and her daughter had apparently recruited Edmund for. He tried to shrug him off with as noncommittal an answer as he could – everything was going well, he was honoured to be helping with such important transcription, he just hadn’t slept as well. There would be a time to go to others with what they knew – to Alfric, to Carwyn, all the way to Godric himself. But what good was it coming to them with a vague suspicion? He had to find something – something more tangible than theories and the speculation that ran through his head as he tried to find something, anything useful.

Days blurred together: sleepless night turned into sleepless night. One afternoon in the scriptorium seemed much like another. He was only able to measure the passing of the days by Robert – by the growing sureness of Robert’s hand, by the slow, faltering creep of the spoken Latin conversations between him and Helena while Edmund buried his nose in a book. Other time had become so meaningless that when on the way back from chapel one morning, Carwyn met Edmund and told him that the wands would be ready to distribute soon, and Edmund was surprised. Hadn’t he said it would take many weeks to work through all of those? But the calendar had rolled on and those weeks _must_ have passed – they were passed Whitsun now, the calendar of feast days and saints days starting to turn its long arc towards the start of summer.

Then, as he shifted on the hard wooden bench and tried to stretch out the crick in his neck, his eyes caught on a few words on the page – and he _saw it_. He was reading in English today – a chronicle of Saxon missionary, bringing the church to England in the dark days when the land was still pagan. But there, tucked between stories of the conversion of a heathen king and the Lord’s miracle to save a harvest, was a plain set of instructions: _A spell by which to summon the spirits of rock, stone and earth_.

He took a breath. Helena was frowning at a scroll before her in Greek, and Robert was making halting attempts at writing more letters after some gentle instruction from Helena earlier. At this moment, he was the only one who knew. The moment he spoke, everything was going to change.

He swallowed. “I have something,” he said – and both heads whipped around within a moment. “Not just an idea, something with detail,” he said. “A spell to summon the spirits of stone. _Any_ spirits, he’s very specific.”

“In buildings?” Helena asked, frowning.

“I’m not sure,” Edmund said, peering at the text closer. “It doesn’t look like any spell I know, but it’s _something_.”

Helena rushed over, pulling her hair back from her face as she peered at the text. Her lips moved silently for a moment, her eyes darting across the page, and Edmund and Robert shared a look of excitement.

“Will it work?” asked Robert, standing up from his chair and peering over.

Helena nodded. “I think so,” she said. “It’s better than anything else we’ve…” she sighed, her hands reaching up to twist a ring off of one finger and pass it from hand to hand. “Yes, it should work,” she said finally. “Though it won’t be easy.” She smiled at them brightly. “I think it’s time we summoned the spirit of Hogwarts.”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Added a few more tags/character tags to the story in an effort to keep them up to date. If something there doesn't make sense just yet - it will in time!


	15. Just Two Men As God Has Made Us

The church bell rang for midnight, and once the echoes had died down, all of Hogwarts was still. Edmund took a deep breath in. He had seen the castle by night, of course, every night and every morning on the way to mass, but he’d never seen it so dark, so empty.

One more time, he lifted his wand up and moved it to point at each corner of the room, sending the beam of light that was their only illumination skittering and making the shadows swing wildly.

“Easy!” Said Robert. “I’ve told you, there’s no one here.”

“You’re just jealous because you can’t make light without a wand,” said Edmund, smiling to try to still some of his own unease. It felt _wrong_ , being here so late.

“I can make light just fine,” Robert said, squinting at the salt circle on the floor and adjusting a few grains to redraw an edge yet again, “because God gave us candles. I’ve never needed to make light without flame before! I’m sure there’s a way.” Edmund shrugged, and Robert continued, “I’m less worried about what spells I might and might not be able to cast, and more concerned that someone’s going to see a light moving around the scriptorium and come and find us.” He glanced down at the circle again. “Can you read what the spell says again?”

Edmund sighed. “You’ve been learning to read for a month now, and you still need me to read this to you?” He tried to quash any uncharitable thoughts about just how much learning Robert had been doing after all. All had seemed to be in order while he had been in the small room off the scriptorium with them the last few weeks, even if their new shared goal had rather limited the amount of learning Robert had been doing. But he could not shake the feeling there was something else going on between him and Helena, some secret understanding forged in their first time together in that room.

“I’m _learning_ ,” Robert said, “but I’m learning Latin. No one seems to think it’s worth me learning my own language.”

Edmund looked at him askance. “I thought you were Norman?”

“I suppose I am,” he said. “But before I came here…” he trailed off, gazing into the heart of the beam of light coming from Edmund’s wand before had to blink and look away. “The witch who taught me magic was Saxon,” she said. “And we spent a lot of time together, before I had to come here.”

Questions hung heavy in the air, but Edmund knew he had no time for them. There were only a few hours that the spell would work in tonight, and that time was fast slipping away. There was time to puzzle over exactly how Robert had come to Hogwarts later. He pulled the scrap of parchment he had copied the instructions onto, squinting at it in the dim light.

“Well, let’s see,” he said, skimming through the page, “two men, strong of magic, must be sitting vigil at the witching hour.” He nodded at Robert. “Well, that’s us,” he said. Robert had a strange look on his face for a moment, but nodded. “And this seems to be the witching hour.”

“This or an hour after midnight,” Robert said with a sigh. “I wish Helena had been clearer.”

“Before them they shall draw a circle of fine salt,” Edmund said, with a nod to the circle before them, “direct upon the earth of the place where the spirit they wish to summon resides.”

The flagstone the two of them had prised up by magic lay to one side. Robert nodded towards it. “Thank God you knew this was loose,” he said. “Or else I’m not sure how we’d have reached bare earth.”

“I’m still not sure it’s _right_ ,” said Edmund. “We want the spirit of the building, not the earth the building is on. But I suppose it can’t hurt to try.” He sighed, and continued. “In this circle, the stone or a mound of earth,” and, sure enough, a chip from the sandstone of the castle walls stood there, “with the foot of a hare, freshly dead and still bloodied.” Edmund grimaced at the memory. Alfric had been all too eager to trade tales of how best to trap a hare with him: he only wished the old man had told him how long the beast would take to stop twitching. Robert simply glanced down at the tiny scrap of flesh and fur, and nodded.

“Edyth always talked of magic that used the blood of living things,” he said. Edmund had the feeling he was talking more to himself than anyone else. “I never thought I’d actually use it.” Suddenly, something made him shudder. “And then?” He said, unable to meet Edmund’s eye.

Edmund glanced back at the page. “This morsel of meat shall please the spirit, and once its hunger is sated will bring it forth…” he skipped over several lines. “There’s a lot more about that here. And then… when all else is prepared, the two witches will pour water from a running brook, gathered under new moon.” He glanced over at Robert, holding up the waterskin. “Then the two of them will sit vigil for some time, and before too long the spirit will appear, called by stone, sated by flesh, and held fast to this earth in water…” He tailed off. “I think that’s everything.

Robert nodded towards the bottle. “I’m ready,” he said. “If you are.”

Edmund reached out so they were both touching the waterskin, exactly as they’d discussed. He wished Helena were here – it didn’t feel right to be doing this without her, not when she’d been such a part of preparing the ingredients and helping interpret the spell. But the spell had said two men, and besides, it was far easier for the two of them to slip away from their dorms, where they would not be missed, than for her to leave Rowena’s private quarters, where she most definitely would be.

“I think I’m ready,” he said, but neither of them made any move yet. He took another breath, furtively glancing around once again to check that no one had come in here. But there was no one, no sound outside the room, and he had no more excuses. They tipped their hands, pouring Robert’s waterskin over the circle.

Nothing happened, nothing except the salt circle being disrupted by the splatter of water. Robert reached out to fix it once more, but drew his hand back before he could touch it.

“Better not,” he said. Both of them stared at the circle, with no effect. “So, now we wait?” He said, barely stifling a huge yawn.

Edmund nodded. He stared into the circle again, and as nothing continued to happen, he shook his head slowly.

“Funny sort of spell,” he said. “I’ve never seen anything like it.”

“Maybe _you_ haven’t,” said Robert. “Ingredients picked at certain phases of the moon, long lists of instructions…” He shrugged. “That was my bread and butter for a lot of the magic I did before I came here.” He shifted, stretching his legs out and resting his feet on the flagstone they’d moved. “It’s funny, really,” he said.

“What do you mean?”

“This is all…” He waved a hand vaguely, over the circle and its contents, “this is all such _Saxon_ magic. I understand that now. Helena’s been saying so much about all these different types of magic that different people, different countries learn…” Robert nodded. “The woman I learnt magic from, she learnt it from another, and another, going back… oh, far further than Hogwarts. This is the kind of magic Saxons have been working for centuries. But here am I, a Norman, having to tell you…” He smiled. “It’s just strange, that’s all.”

Edmund nodded. “I never knew magic before I came to Hogwarts,” he said. “Well, I mean, I _did_ it. By accident. But I didn’t know what I was doing. I’d never even seen it done by someone else before I first came here. I thought…” He shook his head. “I thought I was cursed, somehow. A heathen before God, some kind of sinner. To be able to do these things.” He sighed. “It’s hard to remember what my life was like then, to be honest. feels like I’ve always been here.”

For a moment, Robert didn’t say anything. “So, you get used to it?” He said finally. The circle was as still as ever, and Robert had stopped staring into it – instead, he was lying sprawled across the stone in an improbable pose that Edmund could not imagine was comfortable, staring up at the scriptorium’s vaulted ceiling.

“To what?” Edmund said absently. “Oh, to Hogwarts?” He thought. “Well… yes,” he said. “But it’s been nearly a decade. I don’t know what anything else is like now, not really.” He thought for a moment of Carwyn’s offer. He had been avoiding Carwyn ever since, not sure what to do with this strange opportunity he had been handed and unsure if he even wanted it. He still hadn’t told anyone else about it. He tried to imagine himself, for a moment, as a crafter of fine wands, with a life away from Hogwarts, and found he could not do it. But if he tried to think back to the life he had had before Hogwarts, of his time in the village with Granny, it all felt faint. It had certainly happened to someone, but he wasn’t sure anymore if that someone was him.

“I don’t think I’ll ever get used to it,” Robert said. “Not that I’m staying.”

“What do you mean?”

Robert sighed. “Look, it’s…” He shrugged, and Edmund could hear it in the darkness, the sound of his cloak moving against stone. “This place isn’t for me,” he said. “I don’t need to tell you that, I don’t even want a wand!” Edmund laughed. “I just need to stay a few years,” Robert continued. “A couple of years, and then I’ll head back home.”

“To the witch who taught you? This… Edyth?” Edmund asked.

“I think so,” Robert said. “I wish I knew how she was. What was happening without me.” He paused. “Isn’t there anyone you miss?” He asked.

For a long time, Edmund didn’t answer. How could he? “Perhaps you could write to her,” he said finally. That last question could just sit unanswered. There was no need to go into that just now. “After all of the wands are finished, Carwyn’s meant to be travelling South to London. Perhaps he could find someone along the way who’d be able to pass that along to her, someone on Godric’s witchfinding network, and she’d be able to…”

Robert laughed, stopping him cold before he could finish. “She’d love all of this,” he said. “But… No. I appreciate the thought, but it’s not like she can read.”

“Of course,” Edmund said, embarrassed. Had he really been here so long he’d forgotten how few people, out there in the world, could read at all? “Well,” he said, “maybe she could find someone to read it to her. The village priest, or…”

“No, I don’t think so,” Robert said firmly. Silence hang between them, and Edmund knew he was not the only one leaving things unsaid. He looked back at the circle – undisturbed. Not even the slightest sign of a spirit.

It was going to be a long night.

Edmund knew he had clearly said something wrong – though exactly what that was, he was not sure of. He was just starting to worry that Robert’s breathing could be becoming slower, deeper. If this spell was to work – and it seemed like it was increasingly becoming an ‘if’ – they were both meant to sit vigil.

“I’m sorry,” Robert said at last. “I didn’t mean to be so abrupt.” He shifted, stretching out and sitting up, before his hands went over his stomach. “I’m afraid that this wasn’t the best night for me to sit an undisturbed vigil – something’s disagreed with me and my belly is griping with me.”

Edmund winced in sympathy. “That’s alright,” he said. He paused. “How long do you think it’ll take?”

“The spell?”

“Well, not the belly,” Edmund said, and they both laughed, some of the tension breaking.

“As for the spell…” Robert pondered for a moment, his face suddenly serious. “I don’t know. I never had to do anything so slow.” He yawned again, but seemed to be awake for now, and Edmund felt more relaxed as he echoed his yawn. “I can’t read it, you’ve never done a wandless spell. Some pair we are.” They both laughed again, and Edmund felt at ease once more.

“What do you think the spirit will be like?” Edmund asked. He was beginning to worry that their plan, meticulous as it had been up to this point, was looking decidedly thin once the spirit actually _arrived_. The spell said it would be sated – but was that the same as under their command?

Robert considered. “Well,” he said, “it seems like from what you and Helena were reading, it’ll be something smarter than the tree spirits in the grove. But I’ve never done a spell like this.” He let out another slow sigh. “I wish Helena had been able to be here,” he said. “She’d know.”

“She would,” Edmund agreed. And then, because they had to talk about _something_ while they sat vigil, and because he quite simply couldn’t hold back any longer, he decided to voice the unvoiced question. “Robert,” he said, “listen, about Helena…”

He left the sentence dangling, not wanting to say anything too specific. Better to let Robert fill in the details himself. But Robert didn’t reply at all. After a moment, Edmund looked away from the empty circle, and over at Robert, who was staring at him in puzzlement.

“This isn’t about what you said on the way back from the forest, is it?” A note of caution, a harder edge had entered Robert’s voice. “You _said_ you were going to trust her. You said-“

“No!” Edmund said immediately. It was strange now to think how recently he had distrusted Helena. The two of them – well, the _three_ of them – had thrown themselves so wholeheartedly into this quest that he never even had to think about whether to trust her or not. They were allies – it was instinctual. “No, I just wanted to ask if you were…” He hesitated. “If you and Helena…”

“Are Helena and I _what_?”

Edmund hadn’t imagined it could possibly be this difficult, but as far as he could tell, the look on Robert’s face was genuine. “When you were first learning with her,” he said, “before the wands, before I came along, I thought that perhaps, from the way you looked at each other…” Another blank look. He was going to have to spell it out, wasn’t he?

“Were… are you lovers?” Edmund asked, feeling more and more foolish with every word he spoke. “Or did you want to-“

“Helena and I?” Robert looked at him, aghast. “Why… of course not?”

_Well,_ Edmund thought, _if I’ve started, I might as well finish._ “Look,” he said, trying to adopt the tone of one who was wise to the affairs of the heart, “I’m not here to judge if you are! It’s not… forbidden, not really.” He looked away, finding himself beginning to wilt under the glare of Robert’s incredulity. It really _didn’t_ seem to be an act. “Just that if you _are_ , then I wanted… I wanted to tell you to be careful.”

“I don’t know what to tell you,” Robert said, incredulous. “There’s never been anything going on between us, really.”

If Robert was still worried about anyone up late seeing light come from the scriptorium, they would probably see the glow from how brightly Edmund was blushing. “Look,” he said, “I’m not saying I don’t understand! I mean, the two of you, alone, a man and a woman…” He faltered, his knowledge of the intricacies of courtship rather failing him at this point. “I’ve seen how you look at each other,” he said, deciding to go with something more certain. “And I just wanted to tell you to be careful.”

Robert shook his head slowly. “There’s nothing to be careful about,” he said. “Helena’s been teaching me, she’s been working with me… nothing else.” Edmund made a careful study of the uneventful circle rather than make eye contact with him. “I don’t know where you’re getting this from,” Robert said, and there was some note of confusion, of plaintiveness, in his voice that made Edmund really realise – he was wrong.

“I’m sorry,” he said. He felt like he was saying that a lot recently. “I just thought… well, it doesn’t matter. But I promise, I only wanted what was best for you.”

There was a short pause, and Edmund hoped Robert wasn’t offended. “Believe me,” the other boy said finally, “we really couldn’t…” he shook his head wonderingly. “I really don’t think that could work,” he said. “Not how you’re imagining.”

Edmund frowned at this. It was a strange reaction, and he couldn’t help but wonder if Robert was going to elaborate. But he didn’t, and a long silence stretched out. Perhaps, Edmund thought, that was what he deserved. He wanted to say something, but what was there to say? The two of them sat silently, the only sound of the room their breathing.

The salt circle sat, unchanging. Edmund was beginning to seriously worry that there was something wrong with this spell – either the spell itself, or how they had been carrying it out. But Robert and Helena had both seemed so confident. He wanted to turn to Robert, to ask him something, but his limbs were feeling heavy, suddenly, and moving had become a real struggle. Not that he was falling asleep, of course. No, he was sitting vigil, that was very important. But he didn’t have to _move_ to sit vigil, did he? After all, it was in the name. And if his eyes happened to close a little, that surely wasn’t a problem…

***

Edmund jerked awake in a panic. He didn’t know how much later it was: he hadn’t heard the chapel bell chime, so surely it could not be that much later? All the same, he had definitely not been sitting vigil – and from the slow, deep breathing he heard from Robert, he was not the only one.

Cursing under his breath, he fumbled around on the floor, reaching for his wand. The light had gone out, and he found himself wondering whether the spell stopped as he fell asleep, or when the wand had fallen out his hands. _Think,_ he told himself. _Not your priority right now_. He scrabbled across the cold stone, praying to find his wand until finally his fingers closed on the wood.

“ _Lumos_ ,” he said, hearing Robert stir at the sound. Light flared, and immediately Edmund moved to check the circle. He didn’t know what he was expecting – after all, they had both very much broken the rules about sitting vigil – but there was no change, for better or for worse. Just a scattering of salt on the bare earth, the same increasingly grubby looking meat, the same lump of rock. He sighed. For whatever reason, the spell clearly hadn’t worked, and they were back to the beginning again. He could already see himself tomorrow, half-dazed with lack of sleep, stumbling to the small room whose doorway he could just see, ready to bury himself in another old book in the hopes of finding something – anything – that could help them understand what Slytherin was up to. He did not relish the thought of starting again.

Still, he supposed he had better wake Robert, so that they could lower the stone again and get out of here before any awkward questions were asked. Edmund stood slowly, feeling the stiffness knit into his bones and knowing he’d be cursing himself for falling asleep on hard stone before long. He swung the beam of light from his wand over to Robert, and the boy stirred in the sudden brightness. But Edmund was not looking at his hands raising to shield his face.

Edmund was staring between his legs. For a horrible, embarrassing moment, he thought Robert’s aching belly had betrayed him, and that he had soiled himself. But the stain spreading across his hose wasn’t dark, it was the bright, viscious red of blood.

_A saddlesore_ , Edmund realised. _Robert has been riding, and a saddlesore must have burst_. He tried not to think about the fact that Robert had not, as far as he knew, been on a horse since the hunt – because what else could it be? The instructions for the spell had certainly said nothing about it lashing out and cursing anyone who broke their vigil.

“Hey!” Edmund placed one hand on his shoulder, shaking him to wake him fully. “Hey, wake up, you’re bleeding.”

Robert’s eyes met Edmund’s, open now and wide with fear. “I am?” He asked, his voice taking on a strange tone. He had turned white as a sheet, and it took Edmund a second to realise why his reaction seemed so strange to him.

Robert did not look for the source of the blood, or even bother to check. He asked no further questions, and did not seem to be panicked at the idea that he _was_ bleeding, not really. No, he seemed to understand his fate entirely and find himself resigned to it: the fear, however, was directed entirely at Edmund. Robert was staring at him, frozen like a deer before the hunter’s bow, and was absolutely terrified.

For a long moment, Edmund had absolutely no idea what to do, and was only able to meet Robert’s horrified silence with his own baffled one. But finally, Robert, no less scared than before, spoke. “So,” he said.

“Robert…” Edmund said. He was trying not to look at the blood, but he was unable to look at Robert’s face, at that rictus of dread. What on earth had _he_ done to be so feared?

But Robert just shook his head slowly. “My name’s not Robert,” he said, “of course.” Edmund stared at him. “My name’s Matilde,” she said. “My name’s Matilde, and you’re the first person who’s found out since I left home.”

For a long moment, Edmund’s mind was too perfectly blank for him to say anything. Half-remembered conversations with Granny, many years ago now, about a woman’s time, and being governed by the moon, were dredged up from the depths of his memory, and what was before him began to make more sense. He opened his mouth, found himself still without words, and shut it. After a moment, he opened it again. Finally, when it felt like an age had gone by, he heard his own voice say, “well, I suppose that explains why the spell never worked, if it called for two _men_ strong in magic.”

Robert – or Matilde, he supposed – seemed to soften a little in her face. “I thought that since I’d fooled everyone else,” she said with a weak smile, “perhaps I’d manage to fool the spirits too.”

Edmund felt a thousand miles away. What was happening in front of him was so much to grasp, was so strange, he could do nothing but numbly follow through. He gave a half-laugh, as though she’d made a witty remark about the weather. But there was only so much normality he could try to feign. “But all of this…” he spread his hands, trying to capture the enormity of the life Matilde had built here at Hogwarts. “All of the lies here?” Now it was she who was unable to meet his eyes. “Why?” He said – and while he had initially meant to say more, to ask so many whys, that seemed to sum up best everything that he wanted to ask.

Either name for the person in front of him felt strange now, but they merely shrugged. “Could you turn around?” Matilde said, her hand at the waist of her hose. “If I don’t get a spell on these soon, I’m never going to get the blood out, and it’s the only pair I have.”

Embarrassed, Edmund turned around hurriedly, holding his wand behind his back to light the room enough for her to see what she was doing. He saw the salt circle again, empty in front of them. “Do you need me to create water for you?” He asked. “I could-“

“No, thank you,” she said, cutting him off. “Believe it or not, I’m practised at cleaning this up when I need to. I just…” she swore under her breath, and he could hear the sounds of a trickle of water flowing, scrubbing, and a few murmured words he didn’t understand. “I just got caught off-guard, that’s all, and I didn’t prepare.” There were a few more moments of furious, muttered industry, before she let out a long breath and said “there, that should do.” A moment’s pause. “You don’t have any rags, do you? Old cloth, anything like that?”

“Rags?” Edmund asked.

“If I don’t have something, I’ll probably just bleed through again,” she said.

“ _Oh_.” Edmund had to admit that whatever his Granny had told him about these matters, it had been at least a decade ago, and rather short on detail. “There’s, um, a box of cloths for wiping any ink spillages?” He said. “It’s…” He did not get to finish his sentence before seeing the rag box fly through the air past him.

“Perfect,” Matilde said, “thank you.” After a few moments of adjusting, she added, “you can turn around now.”

Slowly, Edmund did. Matilde looked pale, and anxious, but otherwise had managed to hide any evidence of anything going wrong beyond the dampness of a little water on her hose. He kept looking at her face, expecting her to look somehow _different_ now that he knew her secret, but Robert looked out at him, much the same as ever. It was unnerving.

“I didn’t mean to keep it up for so long,” she said, unprompted. _How do you accidentally pretend to be someone you’re not for months?_ Edmund bit back a response – now she was finally starting to explain, he did not want to risk any interruption. “When I left for Hogwarts,” she said, and she was speaking slowly as if choosing her words with great care, “I left in a hurry. I left some bad things behind me.” Edmund nodded – he, of all people, could understand that. “I had to travel alone,” she said, “and with King Guillame, and the war in the North… it wasn’t safe for a girl to travel.”

“Of course,” Edmund said. He might have known that Guillame the bastard was, somehow, behind this – just as he was everything else.

“And then when I was travelling, I met the Baron, and…” She paused again. “I saw some things,” she said. She didn’t go into detail, but she didn’t need to. Edmund could hear the tension in her voice. “And it wasn’t safe for a girl to travel with him, either. And then of course I was with him until I came here, and now I can’t possibly go back without everyone knowing about the lies, and…” she shrugged, and gave him a small smile. “You’ve taken it well, and I really thank you for that. But I can’t count on everyone being as understanding.”

Edmund considered. What was he supposed to say? There was no anger in him, not really – the quick flash of confusion had been easy to mistake for it, but when he looked into his heart now, he was more worried for her than anything else. “I can see how it would happen,” he said finally.

“Sometimes, I can’t,” said Matilde. “I swear, ever since I left home, things have just been _happening_ to me, with no mind for whether I want them to or not…”

Edmund knew that feeling all too well. “It’s no wonder you weren’t planning on staying at Hogwarts.”

Matilde nodded. “At some point, my voice will have to drop,” she said. “And I’d have to start at least pretending to shave, and it’s not like I’m likely to get much taller, either. It can’t last forever.” She sighed. “Honestly, most days, I think that the sooner I can get out of here the better. If it weren’t for you and Helena, I’d have taken my chances with the open road long ago.”

Helena. Of course. Edmund cursed himself for being so stupid. He far from an expert, of course, but what he’d thought had been something _more_ must simply have been the natural fellowship enjoyed between two women. Even if Helena didn’t _know_ , she must, at some level, have recognised something in Matilde. So much about Matilde’s reaction began to make sense.

“She doesn’t know, does she?” Edmund asked.

Matilde shook her head. “No one does,” she said. “Just you, and…” She shivered. “And Slytherin, I think. I don’t know for sure, but when I swore the oath, there was just something in the way he looked at me…”

“He won’t be feeling as smug if we’re able to do this spell successfully and find out what he’s up to,” Edmund said, and Matilde nodded solemnly.

“You mustn’t tell her, though,” she said.

Edmund nodded. It didn’t feel like his secret to tell. The last few minutes had lead to a flurry of new understanding, to him re-examining every interaction he had had with ‘Robert’ until now – but he didn’t see any malice there. “Of course,” he said. He smiled. “And to think, I thought you two were…”

Slowly, he stopped speaking. Matilde had been smiling, and looking relieved, but suddenly, she was frozen again, looking over his shoulder. He tried to speak, to ask what was wrong, but she just raised her hand and pointed behind him.

Edmund turned around. There was a man standing in the salt circle – a short man with a dark, pointed beard and a broad grin across his face, he was dressed in a garish orange robe with a yellow pointed cap. At first, Edmund wondered who the man was, and how he had never seen him in Hogwarts before – and then the little man took one step forward and _up_ , stepping onto thin air and hovering there. His cap had a bell on the point that tinkled when he moved, and Edmund realised that he had a strange glow to him, lighting him with no need for Edmund’s wand at all.

The figure stepped closer towards them, bell jangling with each step, arms open wide – and each step he took was a good foot off the ground.

“Now, now, now,” he said. The English he spoke had a light Scottish accent, and every syllable was dripping with glee, as though he could not think of anywhere he would rather be than in a dark, silent scriptorium deep into the night. “I believe you two summoned me?” Edmund and Matilde looked at each other, neither knowing quite what to say. “ _What_ kind of vigil do you call this?” Asked the spirit of Hogwarts, grinning far wider than any man could.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> The chapter title is, of course, a My Chemical Romance lyric. It was bound to happen eventually.
> 
> We've stuck with one viewpoint for four chapters, the longest yet in the story so far! Don't worry, next chapter we're back inside Matilde's head.


End file.
